Whatever this website is, it's not a fucking blog. You were probably confused by that little url tagged at the top of the screen that says “jamieabroad.blogspot.com.” First off, blog is an ugly word – a squidgy four letter little turd of a word. Blog does not rhyme with strawberries, sunshine or kissing-in-the-afternoon. Blog does rhyme with snog, a hairball of a British word that reduces the beauty of kissing to the sounds of cooperative gulping. Blog does rhyme with dog, frog, log, flog, bog, clog, smog and sog(gy). Right down to ogre, the associations with “og” in the English language are mostly damp, grayish, and smell funny. My page doesn’t smell funny.
Blogs are sleep inducing records of dog walks, forums for the politically inclined to talk about what a wanker Bush is, pages and pages of goddamned baby pictures. A three AM missive whose contents are "I'm kinda sleepy rite now. Had a ruf day 2day. Here's a pictur of Fluffy drinking from the tolet bowl. Isn't she 2cute?"
This is something much classier and literary. Check out the ridiculous post below "a life in books." The thing was ten single spaced pages on Microsoft Word for chrissakes. Anything that long is way classy.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
dance dance dance
Where: Small club in Iruma, a spectacularly unremarkable Tokyo suburb. Although the music is exclusively hip-hop and R&B, the place is aggressively decorated with fake Hawaiian masks and coconuts. There is a grass hut stuffed with three or four tables next to the dance floor.
When: Exactly one year ago, dead August heat.
Who: A few local English teaching Americans, some Japanese friends from work, a smattering of b-boys in Green Bay Packers caps and local girls wrapped and bowed in summer yukata’s, straight from the local festival.
What: I know it was hot, but this one wiry muscled guy was dancing stark naked in a circle of his loosely clothed friends, his bits and bobs jangling like a custodian’s key chain. Apparently this didn’t satisfy the terms of whatever bet he lost, because after a disappearance of a few minutes he streaks back in through the front door and does a dance that closely resembles an epileptic seizure, writhing on the floor with the possessed look of the ecstatically happy. Whatever was tugging the strings of his skeleton had a dark sense of humor, his right hand desperately trying to light his pubic hair on fire with a ten yen plastic lighter.
=============================================
Where: Bordered by foreign embassies and bars cleared for patronage by the US military, swarming with hookah bars and forty dollar dance clubs, Roppongi doesn’t have the best rep. Originally designated as the official spot for US soldiers to drink, fight and pick up girls during the occupation, the place still has an Interzone kinda vibe to it, floating somewhere outside Japanese society but smack in the heart of Tokyo. This is the spot where English teachers, tourists and Marines go to get hustled by Nigerian guys flyering for dance-halls, strip-clubs and Russian hostess bars, where Western businessmen go to score coke and heroin, Japanese professionals go to slum it up with the foreigners, and foreigners go to pick up loose Japanese. Roppongi clubs sway from postapocalyptic warehouses raves to the merely expensive and sleazy watering holes; places where fun is engaged as more of an intellectual exercise of drink, dance, hook-up, and you can never really shake the fucking paranoia. Every few months my embassy sends out an email warning about some recent shooting or rape involving a US citizen in Roppongi, with the standard advisory to stay away from Roppongi or hold onto that passport if you do. (I don’t think the daily shuttle buses from US military bases are affected by these warnings.)
Right in the eye of all the money and sleaze the Lexington Queen sits like a cease-fire zone for Roppongi combatants, ambitions and aggression checked at the door, everyone equal before the 3000 yen entrance and free drinks all night fee across the board. They say this is where Leonardo DiCaprio dances when he’s in Tokyo, but the most famous people was a jazz drummer from Chicago touring Japan.
When: Last Easter Sunday.
What: Lexington Queen holds no pretensions on music or style: they spin anything that was ever in the top ten, with a lot of weight given to this week, last week and the week before. Last summer we shook it like a Polaroid picture to ahlay mohn but every once in a while you’d get ya freak on, you’d milk shake, or even rock like a virgin. Russian hostesses on their night off, import executives, Nigerian hustlers, export executives, professional ravers, English teachers, Korean students, Indian entrepreneurs, secretaries, waiters, b-boys, dealers, me. They say Sunday is the best club night in Tokyo, all the folks who have been busting their asses in restaurants and bars all week pulling the stops til the first train, just to crash and sleep past noon on Monday. Sometime after a string of slow dance tunes the DJ slipped in Smells Like Teen Spirit, miraculously transforming the dance floor to a bunch of thrashing males who had only danced to the song when they were a) thirteen, b) listening on headphones and c) prancing around their bedroom in their underwear. The girls all went to powder noses or refresh drinks while we moshed the dancefloor back to 1991. It might have been all those tequila sunrises, but I swear to god I saw Jesus there too, his body wrapped in white sheets, sweat loosening the glue of his beard, hair brushing his shoulders, makeshift cross propped in the corner while he crowd surfed.
=============================================
Where: A three leveled, two staged, multi-barred labyrinth of a club in Ebisu, a neighborhood in Tokyo where the import grocery stores and fashion boutiques fight for space against the overwhelming perfume that stalks the streets, so thick you can almost bite it. Jet black interior, dividers and stairwells wrapped in a kilometer or so of thick gray steel wiring, H.R. Giger’s living room. The place looked like the abandoned spaceship from Alien, with just as many people. Beers ran up to \1200 (approx $12 US) for a bottle, your cheapest option was a \750 Corona or a glass of Miller for \700. I smuggled in a bottle of tea.
When: Last Saturday night.
Who: A friend’s electronica group, a slew of DJ’s intently scowling at their equipment, a smattering of bands too busy with their hair to bother thinking about the music, and several dozen of Tokyo’s rich and bored, grimly soldiering another all-nighter with no obvious enthusiasm.
What: Two buddies fresh and glistening from some tropical paradise wandering shirtless: pecs burned nut brown, eyes glazed opaque, hand-hewn djembe drums slung over their shoulders. They performed the needed public service of clenching their biceps for spectators and helping out the bands and DJ’s by adding an extra set of drums from the dance-floor. I had to flee to the corner just to make out the clicks and squeaks and beats from my friend’s electronica group, which was fighting a losing battle against the tribesemen who had seized the room with surfer charisma and bodies not natural to Tokyo.
Hand-drumming duo acts must be sweeping Tokyo clubs, just a few minutes later an exquisitely tailored set of twins wearing tuxedoes burst in with a flourish from their brass molded Greek dumbeks. They had a better sense of timing, their drums snapping brightly to the DJ’s for a minute or so, perfect rows of teeth smiling, then ducked out to dumbstruck faces and enthusiastic applause. The hippie brothers sulked off to a different level of the club.
=============================================
I'll leave the Whys to you.
When: Exactly one year ago, dead August heat.
Who: A few local English teaching Americans, some Japanese friends from work, a smattering of b-boys in Green Bay Packers caps and local girls wrapped and bowed in summer yukata’s, straight from the local festival.
What: I know it was hot, but this one wiry muscled guy was dancing stark naked in a circle of his loosely clothed friends, his bits and bobs jangling like a custodian’s key chain. Apparently this didn’t satisfy the terms of whatever bet he lost, because after a disappearance of a few minutes he streaks back in through the front door and does a dance that closely resembles an epileptic seizure, writhing on the floor with the possessed look of the ecstatically happy. Whatever was tugging the strings of his skeleton had a dark sense of humor, his right hand desperately trying to light his pubic hair on fire with a ten yen plastic lighter.
=============================================
Where: Bordered by foreign embassies and bars cleared for patronage by the US military, swarming with hookah bars and forty dollar dance clubs, Roppongi doesn’t have the best rep. Originally designated as the official spot for US soldiers to drink, fight and pick up girls during the occupation, the place still has an Interzone kinda vibe to it, floating somewhere outside Japanese society but smack in the heart of Tokyo. This is the spot where English teachers, tourists and Marines go to get hustled by Nigerian guys flyering for dance-halls, strip-clubs and Russian hostess bars, where Western businessmen go to score coke and heroin, Japanese professionals go to slum it up with the foreigners, and foreigners go to pick up loose Japanese. Roppongi clubs sway from postapocalyptic warehouses raves to the merely expensive and sleazy watering holes; places where fun is engaged as more of an intellectual exercise of drink, dance, hook-up, and you can never really shake the fucking paranoia. Every few months my embassy sends out an email warning about some recent shooting or rape involving a US citizen in Roppongi, with the standard advisory to stay away from Roppongi or hold onto that passport if you do. (I don’t think the daily shuttle buses from US military bases are affected by these warnings.)
Right in the eye of all the money and sleaze the Lexington Queen sits like a cease-fire zone for Roppongi combatants, ambitions and aggression checked at the door, everyone equal before the 3000 yen entrance and free drinks all night fee across the board. They say this is where Leonardo DiCaprio dances when he’s in Tokyo, but the most famous people was a jazz drummer from Chicago touring Japan.
When: Last Easter Sunday.
What: Lexington Queen holds no pretensions on music or style: they spin anything that was ever in the top ten, with a lot of weight given to this week, last week and the week before. Last summer we shook it like a Polaroid picture to ahlay mohn but every once in a while you’d get ya freak on, you’d milk shake, or even rock like a virgin. Russian hostesses on their night off, import executives, Nigerian hustlers, export executives, professional ravers, English teachers, Korean students, Indian entrepreneurs, secretaries, waiters, b-boys, dealers, me. They say Sunday is the best club night in Tokyo, all the folks who have been busting their asses in restaurants and bars all week pulling the stops til the first train, just to crash and sleep past noon on Monday. Sometime after a string of slow dance tunes the DJ slipped in Smells Like Teen Spirit, miraculously transforming the dance floor to a bunch of thrashing males who had only danced to the song when they were a) thirteen, b) listening on headphones and c) prancing around their bedroom in their underwear. The girls all went to powder noses or refresh drinks while we moshed the dancefloor back to 1991. It might have been all those tequila sunrises, but I swear to god I saw Jesus there too, his body wrapped in white sheets, sweat loosening the glue of his beard, hair brushing his shoulders, makeshift cross propped in the corner while he crowd surfed.
=============================================
Where: A three leveled, two staged, multi-barred labyrinth of a club in Ebisu, a neighborhood in Tokyo where the import grocery stores and fashion boutiques fight for space against the overwhelming perfume that stalks the streets, so thick you can almost bite it. Jet black interior, dividers and stairwells wrapped in a kilometer or so of thick gray steel wiring, H.R. Giger’s living room. The place looked like the abandoned spaceship from Alien, with just as many people. Beers ran up to \1200 (approx $12 US) for a bottle, your cheapest option was a \750 Corona or a glass of Miller for \700. I smuggled in a bottle of tea.
When: Last Saturday night.
Who: A friend’s electronica group, a slew of DJ’s intently scowling at their equipment, a smattering of bands too busy with their hair to bother thinking about the music, and several dozen of Tokyo’s rich and bored, grimly soldiering another all-nighter with no obvious enthusiasm.
What: Two buddies fresh and glistening from some tropical paradise wandering shirtless: pecs burned nut brown, eyes glazed opaque, hand-hewn djembe drums slung over their shoulders. They performed the needed public service of clenching their biceps for spectators and helping out the bands and DJ’s by adding an extra set of drums from the dance-floor. I had to flee to the corner just to make out the clicks and squeaks and beats from my friend’s electronica group, which was fighting a losing battle against the tribesemen who had seized the room with surfer charisma and bodies not natural to Tokyo.
Hand-drumming duo acts must be sweeping Tokyo clubs, just a few minutes later an exquisitely tailored set of twins wearing tuxedoes burst in with a flourish from their brass molded Greek dumbeks. They had a better sense of timing, their drums snapping brightly to the DJ’s for a minute or so, perfect rows of teeth smiling, then ducked out to dumbstruck faces and enthusiastic applause. The hippie brothers sulked off to a different level of the club.
=============================================
I'll leave the Whys to you.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
a life in books
“A book is a mysterious object... once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.” –Paul Auster, from Leviathan
1. Fiction.
Read one too many novels and your life starts to resemble one. Everyday objects morph into personal symbols (“beer cans”, “the rusty faucet”, “favorite pair of jeans”), you try to guess out your friends through internal character sketches, remembering a girl from high school becomes a flashback. But hanging over every paragraph spent comparing fish prices at the local market, every stretch of dialogue with friends (“You should start doing push-ups...”), every chapter ending (“... raspy sounds of a man croaking out karaoke curled in through the window and wriggled into his head to tangle and tease the thoughts inside.”): arching over the whole thing are the plot questions, the career and love and family and death questions. Like a well crafted novel we usually tend to wrestle with these issues every day, in fits and spurts, in lies and wishes, without even realizing it. Eventually we tumble out the other end, and the world looks a litttle different.
Ever since it came to light that my work visa renewal was not exactly a sure thing I had to split my mind down two paths, preparing both for an abrupt return to the states and another year of life in Japan. I spent two months gathering the necessary documents and putting off writing my letter of apology and explanation to the immigration bureau until the last possible minute.
Once all the other documents had been cleared I holed up in a cafe and wrote the damn thing in a two hour burst, just in time to meet up with a Japanese friend who helped hew my rough and boastful Japanese into something clean and laced with formal pronouns. She had also insisted on adding a final paragraph where I pleaded for a visa not simply on account of my job but out of a sense of responsibility to an international exchange group that I volunteered at, doing my humble part to broaden and internationalize the greater Saitama area. It was exactly the type of meaningless drivel I’d avoided throughout the entire letter, trying to project myself as confident but affable, a productive and harmonious member of Japanese society; I would appeal to the system’s sense of decency, I wouldn’t pull out my Americanness, whiteness, or maleness just to get a visa. “I know these people,” she said firmly, cutting off my objections “they eat this stuff up.”
After having spent several hours in the dead flabby air of an aggressively air conditioned Starbucks I left the place lightheaded, my throat aching. I spent the last day of my deadline worrying over ever sentence in the grips of the early stages of a headcold. Did my friend really “know these people”? They dealt with lines of Chinese and Brazilians every day – people who had lived here for most of their lives, their Japanese unmarred by accents but marked by a kind of alien directness and brevity that bowled through the paragraphs of apologizing that usually frame a conversation. No way these hardened immigration officers would fall for my white boy shtick, waving a certificate of Japanese proficiency (Not quite first level yet!), gee- shucks American apologizing for a year-and-a-half of visa violations (well, this alien culture just so confusin’...), and a desperate plea to help continue my “internationalization” activities. Right. I could see the guy already, little bureaucrat with a face that looked and smelled like creamed coffee, brow knotted over this letter that begged him to consider my community service in spreading American culture. But then again, somebody had to be buying all those Norman Rockwell collections I’d seen placed so prominently in the arts section of the local bookstore.
With less than an hour left before the office closed for the weekend I finally decided to agree with her and kept the paragraph in. I tucked the printout into a folder with signed letters and officially stamped tax records, timelines of my workplaces in Japan, certificates of Japanese proficiency and my college diploma. I arrived sweaty from my mid-summer bike sprint, t-shirt sticking to my back, sweat contracting to salt as I plunged into the bubble of air-conditioning. The large waiting area was mostly empty, the staff shuffling the last of their papers before the weekend. Waiting numbers floating in electric red above the service counters, but no one there to service, or to wait.
I stepped out ten minutes later with a “Visa in Processing” stamp on my passport, arms and organs shivering like I'd just walked off a first date. There was nothing I could do but wait for the gears to whir through their course and just have the machine spit out my goddamn fortune already.
2. Book Worm.
Between the ages of ten and fourteen I was thrown into a Kafka fucking holding pen called Coleytown Middle School, and I hated every minute of it. It was a four year educational white out between the blissful romps of elementary school and high school’s scramble into jobs and colleges. No one had any idea why we were there or what we were supposed to be doing, least of all the teachers. Our geriatric English teachers hadn’t read the assigned books in years, so we simply invented plots and characters in our weekly book reports. I failed a sixth grade geography project for being too lazy to include an isthmus in my diorama. Computer skills classes mostly dissolved into furious typing battles, filling the entire screen of our Macintoshes with fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou
fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou...
Sometime back in prehistory the popular cro-magnons had staked out their territory closest to the windows and bequeathed the space to their descendants, who claimed their birthright each year, sliding into the same plastic scoop seats as their forefathers. They ate trays of hamburgers and brown bag lunches bathed in sunlight, the doors to recess luxuriously convenient. My first lessons in real estate. Location, location, location. Your social position corresponded exactly to your seating positions: the farther you sat from the doors, the lower you sank on the social graph. I treaded water somewhere round the lower end of the average boys, a seat barely touched by the sun. The bodies around me were savage, unfathomable. The other boys at my lunch table blazoned their bodies with sports jackets and baseball hats bearing the icons of wild animals: Wolverines, Bruins, Hornets. To my right was a small jungle of snarling thirteen year olds, to my left, the pitch black depths of the socially unmoored. They floated aimlessly in ones and twos in the dark corners of the cafeteria, bathed in odors belching from the kitchen doors; ghosts and outcasts, chewing their food in silence. They terrified me, and I hated their injured animal eyes that would search my face for compassion. I had nothing for them. With my whole field of vision as clogged by rabid creatures. I developed a habit of looking down: most often straight into a fantasy novel.
Fantasy. Contemporary Fantasy. I had started years before with Lloyd Alexander’s dark and beautiful amalgams of Welsh legends in “The Horned King” and “The Black Cauldron”, and was probably triggered even earlier by the gorgeously illustrated D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. But by middle school I was chomping through reams of novels by contemporary American writers like Raymond Feist, David Eddings and Anthony Jordan. All of their books were wonderfully small variations on a story that I never tired of reading: orphaned and misunderstood boy turns out to be messiah, thrust out into a cold and uncaring world with a small band of companions on some quest, beset by [insert author’s monster preference here: orcs, goblins, dragons], romantic awkwardness with feisty girl his own age, battle with forces of darkness, social order overturned, evil punished, boy has become a man and hero. These books were wonderfully predictable in overall plot and structure, but they were delicious in their details, in their deep imagined histories, in the crude and stylized maps tucked into the front cover. They were coming of age stories draped in iron age legends and World War II alliances of good nations banding together to defeat the armies of darkness. They crushed up the emotions of my daily life and distilled them into a sweet clear vapor that plucked my soul like an open guitar.
I devoured them savagely, gulping down whole chapters without pausing to think, absently skipping descriptive paragraphs for meatier ones. I read during recess, I read during study hall, I read between classes, I read in my room when I got home. If I was reaching the end of a fantasy novel I’d make sure to bring its sequel to school with me. There was always a sequel. My dolphin blue backpack, already stuffed with math and social studies textbooks, was also crammed with at least two fantasy hardbacks. Mom raged at me as I shouldered this bag of boulders using only one strap. Everyone knew going two strap was for losers. I honestly didn’t notice the weight, my mind too busy flickering with images myself wracked in study of ancient scrolls and spells: hours of careful study over precious manuscripts while the world of evil armies and mindless politics swirled around me.
My fifth grade social studies curriculum consisted of a year of studying the social habits of animals. I can remember learning exactly two things from the class: seagulls regurgitating food for their young (A: You are totally gonna regurgitate that those curly fries. B: What, you wanna eat my barf or something? Eww, you’re such a sicko, SICKO!), and that Eskimos clothing left pockets of air between the cloth and the skin to stay warm. Apparently Eskimos were also considered animals, being the last species covered that year.
It was unclear exactly what lessons we were supposed to take from the class, so many decided to pursue independent study projects in farting noises and ways to torture our social studies teacher, Mr. Hanson. He always seemed like a nice enough guy to me, but Mr. Hanson must have done something really terrible in a previous life to be given this job, shivery as his body was with Parkinson's. He looked like a skeleton marionette, clanking into class on a special pair of crutches, his skinny limbs twitching to invisible strings. His voice wavered as well, but at least he spoke to you and not an idea of you, brown eyes soft behind his thick glasses. He was frail and nearing the end of his tenure, but he wasn’t sour or bitter or gray like my other teachers. The kids in the class called him Dancin’ Hanson.
One day when he hobbled into the room and took a seat at his desk only to find the chair slathered in the gel from a punctured executive stress squeeze ball that some rich little shit had probably stolen from his stock broker father. As the entire class of twelve year olds dissolved into a hurricane of yells Mr. Hanson’s gaze flailed around wildly, eventually meeting my eyes in the front row. “Jamie! Get help!” I froze in my seat. The old bastard was going to bring me down with him, he’d cursed me with trust, he’d pulled me out of my warm little anonymity in the second row. There was nothing to be done. I sprinted across the hall to the principal’s office and retrieved a younger and scarier disciplinarian whose voice stung like whip, slapping the hooting room of primates into a grid of children, shivering at their desks.
Years later even girls in the class would be able to stop me cold with a warbly “Jamie! Get help!” After a whole year of seagull, otter and Eskimo filmstrips I had finally learned something useful about animal behavior: anyone straying from the pack will be culled. There was no messiah story here, there was no kindly older wizard, eyes twinkling with the secrets of the universe. My reading was an opiate, it had nothing to do with the world I lived in. It was fantasy. Contemporary. Fantasy.
3. Auster.
Somehow I limped out of the petty tyrannies and dark woods of middle school intact, and by high school I’d put aside my fantasy paperbacks with their oil painting covers of boy wizards and elfin maidens with breasts the size of their heads. I would occasionally see them in curls of smoke at a New York rock club or popping out of carpets like a magic eye poster. All the dope I smoked and mushrooms I dropped tickled through years of dreams and images, dredging up old stories and hobbling together new ones from the cracks and crevasses of my fifteen year old skull.
It was around this time that the fiction of Paul Auster began to creep into my life. An English teacher handed my class a bizarre little New York Times piece with his name attached. It was like a case file from a detective story, a smattering of clues paper clipped together in a binder marked “Why Write?” Under that cryptic title were about a dozen anecdotes of chance and coincidence, of families and lovers torn apart, reunited in strange coincidences, each as unique, strange and inevitable as Oedipus. Icy and precise little crystals. I puzzled over the thing for close to a month, the title boring at me insistently. It was my first exercise in close reading, in engaging a piece of writing that wasn't barreling through the familiar stops and plot points to end at the same terminal. This wasn't a ride, this was a maze.
His work popped up again, tucked away innocently on a back shelf of the high school library like an undetonated bomb. Auster books are like that, exquisitely crafted little packages whose design just barely keeps the whole thing from dissolving into chaos. They trace the madness and mystery of living in a calm, cold and controlling prose that is coiled just tight enough to not explode. “In the Country of Last Things” was a purely invented world, but it was not magical or wondrous. There were no kindly old wizards, it did not arc to final battles of good and evil. It was a young woman crawling through a decaying urban landscape fenced off from the outside world, searching for her disappeared brother. It was a small packet of horror, an amalgam of decaying New York of the 70’s and 80’s and closed off Jewish ghettoes of the holocaust, it was stories of middle class civilization chewing itself to death. And there it was on the green gunmetal shelving next to Auden, ignored by the librarians and the few students who ventured into the library.
With their stark covers, slim two hundred page sizes and odors of years in public libraries Auster books were a very different species from the chunky five hundred page dragon and wizard splashed epics I'd been lugging around years before. But they both had self contained worlds churning beneath their covers. To move through Auster writing is to stare at the eternal strangeness of the human universe, a series of shocks and chances that twist and warp the characters into strange new shapes by the end of the book, so that they are left alone, blinking at their lives and calmly thinking “how did I get here?” His books are peopled with men and women possessed by ideas, ideas that shifted the world around them. Mr. Auster will descend into the story to talk with them himself, discuss their goals and fears. But essentially they are calm, stoic and resourceful against the horrors around them. Here was adulthood, here was responsibility, staring down the horrors of life. I would close Auster books a little bit older than when I started them, a little bit warped and weathered for the experience.
It was all so New York, all so literary, so liberated, so fucking ex.
uh.
stential.
4. Immigration.
And it was after handing in my visa application that I settled down to Paul Auster again: a new edition of one of his novels from the late eighties. It was wrapped in a sexy new cover, solid black stripes crowding across a photograph of a Brooklyn tenement. Here was another small bomb left ticking on the shelf.
That strange logics of the book were doing laps around my head as I headed back to the immigration bureau on a Monday morning, my college diploma and two passport size photos in hand. In all my haste to get the application in, I had forgotten these two essential components. I fear bureaucracy like a computer, one typo throwing the entire process into spasms of error messages and barred entry. I learned to type a long time ago, but I haven’t renewed my passport yet.
I suppose all the visa issues that had built up over the weekend burst out on Monday morning. It was a press of bodies, a loud, brassy, and distinctly un-Japanese mob of Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians and Filipinos dotted with a few black and white faces. I left a small space between the family in front of me to let people pass through and was promptly cut off by a fierce looking Thai woman. The Chinese family protested helplessly in confused Japanese as the immigration official curtly tried to explain that Mom would not be able to join them in Japan. This went on for a few minutes, the father and daughter eventually leaving with rain clouds circling their heads, Mom no closer to them than we they walked in. The Thai woman finished her business quickly and I stepped up to the counter.
Maybe it was just imagination, but the face of the woman behind the counter seemed to curl into a genuine smile as I approached, something reserved for the handful of white folks who make their way through this immigration bureau. I asked her where I should submit my diploma and pictures, which launched us into a brief debate on visa application procedure. In my favor I had two passport size photos, a copy of my diploma, and all the shit my friend had told me. In her favor she had a few decades of experience working for immigration. I was pretty confident of winning, but somehow her age and experience in visa applications trumped my youth and hearsay, so I left with my college diploma and two regulation size passport photos, no closer to my visa than when I walked in. I wandered to the mega-bookstore next door and browsed the long rows of paperback fiction. They were grouped by publisher into uniformed little squadrons, height and length regulated, spines all a single color. I picked out a book of short stories by a mystery writer I knew, buying it for a few hundred yen.
5. Reading Japanese.
Every book leaves an aftertaste. The fantasy novels were M&Ms and cans of Coca-Cola, leaving you thirstier and hungrier than when you started. I would finish each one on a quivering sugar-high, too pepped up to think beyond the sequel. I finished Auster books satiated, the tastes of pepper and salmon lolling around my tongue. You don’t close a book simply full, your body has just emerged from a bath of sensations. Dreams and symbols digesting in your mind, moving into the bloodstream, into your bones and out your ass. The cells in our bodies regenerate completely every few years along similar patterns, how often do our minds regenerate?
Speech and language are hard wired into the brain, God’s anonymous little gift to the baby shower, but writing and letters were made by human magic, scratches willed into life. They bear the contradictions of their makers, are in need of constant tinkering and adjustments, follow the laws we give them. Speaking always flows in the same direction in time, but words can move in any direction through space, English words stacked in horizontal brick rows, peppered with periods, commas, exclamation marks, Arabic drifting from right to left in continuous smoky curls, Chinese characters dangling top to bottom in long beaded curtains unbroken by spacing or punctuation.
Five years ago I embarked on an expedition outside the English language and into the shifting urban jungles of Japanese. Even as I made my first tentative forays into speaking (“Is this a pencil?” “The post office is across the street.”), their written counterparts always seemed much more mysterious and sexy, long draping columns made of thorny little symbols. The promise of diving into the raw, untranslated literature of a country removed from the winds of European thought would be like walking on the moon, testing out the altered physics and fingering the dust of another planet.
A friend once told me that after English Japanese is the most published language in the world; the language of 120 million island dwellers living on the edge of the world beating out French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian. I don’t know if this is true, but it rings true. While the thousand tentacle branches of national and local governments do their part to flood the world in Japanese documents, the publishing industry is no slacker, with at least a dozen telephone book size comic publications coming out every week, succeeded by a rich array of novels and histories, quietly consumed in train cars and rackety bedrooms. I had unknowingly leapt into one of the largest linguistic oceans in the world.
After a year or so spent deciphering the speech bubbles of comics I dove into the deep end of the pool, flailing my way through an extended essay by Haruku Murakami on his whiskey tasting trip through Scotland and Ireland. When I emerged grasping at the other end I checked myself, I swallowed the taste in my mouth. It was raw and wooly, with overtones of Auster’s clear polished intelligence and clarity but shot through with smoky little bits of poetry. He had squeezed these symbols into extistence and they had shone off the page, burning images of Scottish distilleries, wild Celtic drivers on country lanes and old men trading stories over glasses of single malt whiskeys. The first Japanese book I had read told me about life in the British isles, where they speak English anyway. Oh well.
6. The Big Day.
Here pasta was a big part of my diet and I’d run out of fucking olive oil. I had a whole cupboard stuffed with vinegars, soy sauces, dried pastas, and all I could think about was olive oil. But what if I was moving in two weeks? What would happen to that sweet golden syrup? I couldn’t just chuck it down the drain. And hell, all my friends around here live at home, they don’t even cook. I mean, I suppose I could do without it for a few weeks but goddamnit I wanted to dip my bread in herbed olive oil. Actually, the brown rice seemed to be getting low too, and they only sell brown rice in five kilo bags at the supermarket. I was dropping money left and right on histories of Japanese sake and George Orwell essays, but somehow I couldn’t spring for a bottle of fucking olive oil. I needed to start cleaning out that cupboard. It was good the postcard came when it did or I’d have been forced to stomach strange pasta sauces of red miso and black rice vinegar.
They said it would take a month, but the postcard had arrived after two weeks, requesting my presence down at the immigration bureau sometime before August 19th. I knew it. The whole application had been so riddled with holes and pockmarks they had taken one look at it and tossed it in the “Denial” bin with a cynical laugh. It would be better to just head in and get the whole damn thing over which I resolved to do the next Monday, when I had the whole day off.
My eyes fluttered open on Monday morning and I turned over the idea of heading to immigration or reading another chapter in the mystery novel I was reading. I recalled the press I’d experienced the last time I’d been down and decide to wait til the afternoon. Besides, the detective had finally located the apartment shown in the video of the missing girl. I would much rather spend the morning trailing the victim’s ex-boyfriend with private investigator Miro Murano than have my rejection summarily handed to me among screaming babies and lines of other foreign nationals desperate for a work visa.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon by the time I’d put the thing down and gone outside for a walk. I hadn’t eaten anything besides a quick breakfast, so I threw together a lunch of tofu and soba noodles, letting it settle in my stomach with a cup of tea. But now it was a little after three, and the place closed at four. Well, gee, guess I couldn’t make it that day, and I hafta work tomorrow...
Tuesday came and went, my mind was less preoccupied with the visa situation than with whether Miro was starting to fall for the film producer who was starting to look a lot like the perpetrator. Wednesday morning was wide open, and I resolved to go just after I’d found out who the mysterious woman was that seemed to be paying Miro’s employer large sums of cash. And so the morning disappeared. I was feeling vaguely ill when I left for work, body bored and restless from sitting with a book all morning, mind desperately burrowing into the novel and refusing to acknowledge any slighter larger issues that it might be better to start considering. Thursday morning and I had fifteen pages left and no excuse. Miro found the poor girl recovering in a hospital room, her mother having thrown herself out a fifth story window after confessing to killing her former lover in order to protect her marriage to the wealthy industrial heir. Miro had finally waded through all the lies and counter-lies to arrive at this hospital bed, the nineteen year old girl reading comics to shut out the cruelty that had been dogging her from page one. I closed the book and felt its last few lines bounce around my head, the detective walking through the empty hallway, tired and exhausted from confronting the world of human greed and lies for four hundred and thirteen pages, but walking away with the grim satisfaction of having confronted the world with open eyes. “Hey Jamie!” the world was screaming, “Get your ass down to immigration!”
I took a number and sat down on the padded benches they had laid out as a waiting room. It wasn’t so busy today, just a few Korean families and a score of nervous looking Iranians. I read the posters as I waited. Security camera photos of a Chinese man wanted for questioning on burglary and assault. An impossibly cute claymation woman in an immigration officers uniform gave me the rundown on recent changes in visa law. “Spousal visas have been extended to five year terms!” “Always bring four thousand yen for your visa processing fee!” “Remember, all violations can be punished by deportation and a ban from the country for up to seven years!” I finished that one when my number was called.
“Okay great, can I have your passport please? Excellent, here’s your one year working visa, make sure to head down to your local city hall in the next two weeks to register the changes on your ID card. Thank you very much for coming to the immigration bureau today NEXT!” And that was that.
7. One Last Thing.
I was bursting to tell someone the news so I hurried out past the book megastore down to a nearby imported grocery store where a friend works. I looked up and down the aisles for her but it looked like she had the morning off. I was just about to leave when my eyes fell on a rack of extra virgin olive oil discounted 20%. I had cooking to do.
1. Fiction.
Read one too many novels and your life starts to resemble one. Everyday objects morph into personal symbols (“beer cans”, “the rusty faucet”, “favorite pair of jeans”), you try to guess out your friends through internal character sketches, remembering a girl from high school becomes a flashback. But hanging over every paragraph spent comparing fish prices at the local market, every stretch of dialogue with friends (“You should start doing push-ups...”), every chapter ending (“... raspy sounds of a man croaking out karaoke curled in through the window and wriggled into his head to tangle and tease the thoughts inside.”): arching over the whole thing are the plot questions, the career and love and family and death questions. Like a well crafted novel we usually tend to wrestle with these issues every day, in fits and spurts, in lies and wishes, without even realizing it. Eventually we tumble out the other end, and the world looks a litttle different.
Ever since it came to light that my work visa renewal was not exactly a sure thing I had to split my mind down two paths, preparing both for an abrupt return to the states and another year of life in Japan. I spent two months gathering the necessary documents and putting off writing my letter of apology and explanation to the immigration bureau until the last possible minute.
Once all the other documents had been cleared I holed up in a cafe and wrote the damn thing in a two hour burst, just in time to meet up with a Japanese friend who helped hew my rough and boastful Japanese into something clean and laced with formal pronouns. She had also insisted on adding a final paragraph where I pleaded for a visa not simply on account of my job but out of a sense of responsibility to an international exchange group that I volunteered at, doing my humble part to broaden and internationalize the greater Saitama area. It was exactly the type of meaningless drivel I’d avoided throughout the entire letter, trying to project myself as confident but affable, a productive and harmonious member of Japanese society; I would appeal to the system’s sense of decency, I wouldn’t pull out my Americanness, whiteness, or maleness just to get a visa. “I know these people,” she said firmly, cutting off my objections “they eat this stuff up.”
After having spent several hours in the dead flabby air of an aggressively air conditioned Starbucks I left the place lightheaded, my throat aching. I spent the last day of my deadline worrying over ever sentence in the grips of the early stages of a headcold. Did my friend really “know these people”? They dealt with lines of Chinese and Brazilians every day – people who had lived here for most of their lives, their Japanese unmarred by accents but marked by a kind of alien directness and brevity that bowled through the paragraphs of apologizing that usually frame a conversation. No way these hardened immigration officers would fall for my white boy shtick, waving a certificate of Japanese proficiency (Not quite first level yet!), gee- shucks American apologizing for a year-and-a-half of visa violations (well, this alien culture just so confusin’...), and a desperate plea to help continue my “internationalization” activities. Right. I could see the guy already, little bureaucrat with a face that looked and smelled like creamed coffee, brow knotted over this letter that begged him to consider my community service in spreading American culture. But then again, somebody had to be buying all those Norman Rockwell collections I’d seen placed so prominently in the arts section of the local bookstore.
With less than an hour left before the office closed for the weekend I finally decided to agree with her and kept the paragraph in. I tucked the printout into a folder with signed letters and officially stamped tax records, timelines of my workplaces in Japan, certificates of Japanese proficiency and my college diploma. I arrived sweaty from my mid-summer bike sprint, t-shirt sticking to my back, sweat contracting to salt as I plunged into the bubble of air-conditioning. The large waiting area was mostly empty, the staff shuffling the last of their papers before the weekend. Waiting numbers floating in electric red above the service counters, but no one there to service, or to wait.
I stepped out ten minutes later with a “Visa in Processing” stamp on my passport, arms and organs shivering like I'd just walked off a first date. There was nothing I could do but wait for the gears to whir through their course and just have the machine spit out my goddamn fortune already.
2. Book Worm.
Between the ages of ten and fourteen I was thrown into a Kafka fucking holding pen called Coleytown Middle School, and I hated every minute of it. It was a four year educational white out between the blissful romps of elementary school and high school’s scramble into jobs and colleges. No one had any idea why we were there or what we were supposed to be doing, least of all the teachers. Our geriatric English teachers hadn’t read the assigned books in years, so we simply invented plots and characters in our weekly book reports. I failed a sixth grade geography project for being too lazy to include an isthmus in my diorama. Computer skills classes mostly dissolved into furious typing battles, filling the entire screen of our Macintoshes with fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou
fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou...
Sometime back in prehistory the popular cro-magnons had staked out their territory closest to the windows and bequeathed the space to their descendants, who claimed their birthright each year, sliding into the same plastic scoop seats as their forefathers. They ate trays of hamburgers and brown bag lunches bathed in sunlight, the doors to recess luxuriously convenient. My first lessons in real estate. Location, location, location. Your social position corresponded exactly to your seating positions: the farther you sat from the doors, the lower you sank on the social graph. I treaded water somewhere round the lower end of the average boys, a seat barely touched by the sun. The bodies around me were savage, unfathomable. The other boys at my lunch table blazoned their bodies with sports jackets and baseball hats bearing the icons of wild animals: Wolverines, Bruins, Hornets. To my right was a small jungle of snarling thirteen year olds, to my left, the pitch black depths of the socially unmoored. They floated aimlessly in ones and twos in the dark corners of the cafeteria, bathed in odors belching from the kitchen doors; ghosts and outcasts, chewing their food in silence. They terrified me, and I hated their injured animal eyes that would search my face for compassion. I had nothing for them. With my whole field of vision as clogged by rabid creatures. I developed a habit of looking down: most often straight into a fantasy novel.
Fantasy. Contemporary Fantasy. I had started years before with Lloyd Alexander’s dark and beautiful amalgams of Welsh legends in “The Horned King” and “The Black Cauldron”, and was probably triggered even earlier by the gorgeously illustrated D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. But by middle school I was chomping through reams of novels by contemporary American writers like Raymond Feist, David Eddings and Anthony Jordan. All of their books were wonderfully small variations on a story that I never tired of reading: orphaned and misunderstood boy turns out to be messiah, thrust out into a cold and uncaring world with a small band of companions on some quest, beset by [insert author’s monster preference here: orcs, goblins, dragons], romantic awkwardness with feisty girl his own age, battle with forces of darkness, social order overturned, evil punished, boy has become a man and hero. These books were wonderfully predictable in overall plot and structure, but they were delicious in their details, in their deep imagined histories, in the crude and stylized maps tucked into the front cover. They were coming of age stories draped in iron age legends and World War II alliances of good nations banding together to defeat the armies of darkness. They crushed up the emotions of my daily life and distilled them into a sweet clear vapor that plucked my soul like an open guitar.
I devoured them savagely, gulping down whole chapters without pausing to think, absently skipping descriptive paragraphs for meatier ones. I read during recess, I read during study hall, I read between classes, I read in my room when I got home. If I was reaching the end of a fantasy novel I’d make sure to bring its sequel to school with me. There was always a sequel. My dolphin blue backpack, already stuffed with math and social studies textbooks, was also crammed with at least two fantasy hardbacks. Mom raged at me as I shouldered this bag of boulders using only one strap. Everyone knew going two strap was for losers. I honestly didn’t notice the weight, my mind too busy flickering with images myself wracked in study of ancient scrolls and spells: hours of careful study over precious manuscripts while the world of evil armies and mindless politics swirled around me.
My fifth grade social studies curriculum consisted of a year of studying the social habits of animals. I can remember learning exactly two things from the class: seagulls regurgitating food for their young (A: You are totally gonna regurgitate that those curly fries. B: What, you wanna eat my barf or something? Eww, you’re such a sicko, SICKO!), and that Eskimos clothing left pockets of air between the cloth and the skin to stay warm. Apparently Eskimos were also considered animals, being the last species covered that year.
It was unclear exactly what lessons we were supposed to take from the class, so many decided to pursue independent study projects in farting noises and ways to torture our social studies teacher, Mr. Hanson. He always seemed like a nice enough guy to me, but Mr. Hanson must have done something really terrible in a previous life to be given this job, shivery as his body was with Parkinson's. He looked like a skeleton marionette, clanking into class on a special pair of crutches, his skinny limbs twitching to invisible strings. His voice wavered as well, but at least he spoke to you and not an idea of you, brown eyes soft behind his thick glasses. He was frail and nearing the end of his tenure, but he wasn’t sour or bitter or gray like my other teachers. The kids in the class called him Dancin’ Hanson.
One day when he hobbled into the room and took a seat at his desk only to find the chair slathered in the gel from a punctured executive stress squeeze ball that some rich little shit had probably stolen from his stock broker father. As the entire class of twelve year olds dissolved into a hurricane of yells Mr. Hanson’s gaze flailed around wildly, eventually meeting my eyes in the front row. “Jamie! Get help!” I froze in my seat. The old bastard was going to bring me down with him, he’d cursed me with trust, he’d pulled me out of my warm little anonymity in the second row. There was nothing to be done. I sprinted across the hall to the principal’s office and retrieved a younger and scarier disciplinarian whose voice stung like whip, slapping the hooting room of primates into a grid of children, shivering at their desks.
Years later even girls in the class would be able to stop me cold with a warbly “Jamie! Get help!” After a whole year of seagull, otter and Eskimo filmstrips I had finally learned something useful about animal behavior: anyone straying from the pack will be culled. There was no messiah story here, there was no kindly older wizard, eyes twinkling with the secrets of the universe. My reading was an opiate, it had nothing to do with the world I lived in. It was fantasy. Contemporary. Fantasy.
3. Auster.
Somehow I limped out of the petty tyrannies and dark woods of middle school intact, and by high school I’d put aside my fantasy paperbacks with their oil painting covers of boy wizards and elfin maidens with breasts the size of their heads. I would occasionally see them in curls of smoke at a New York rock club or popping out of carpets like a magic eye poster. All the dope I smoked and mushrooms I dropped tickled through years of dreams and images, dredging up old stories and hobbling together new ones from the cracks and crevasses of my fifteen year old skull.
It was around this time that the fiction of Paul Auster began to creep into my life. An English teacher handed my class a bizarre little New York Times piece with his name attached. It was like a case file from a detective story, a smattering of clues paper clipped together in a binder marked “Why Write?” Under that cryptic title were about a dozen anecdotes of chance and coincidence, of families and lovers torn apart, reunited in strange coincidences, each as unique, strange and inevitable as Oedipus. Icy and precise little crystals. I puzzled over the thing for close to a month, the title boring at me insistently. It was my first exercise in close reading, in engaging a piece of writing that wasn't barreling through the familiar stops and plot points to end at the same terminal. This wasn't a ride, this was a maze.
His work popped up again, tucked away innocently on a back shelf of the high school library like an undetonated bomb. Auster books are like that, exquisitely crafted little packages whose design just barely keeps the whole thing from dissolving into chaos. They trace the madness and mystery of living in a calm, cold and controlling prose that is coiled just tight enough to not explode. “In the Country of Last Things” was a purely invented world, but it was not magical or wondrous. There were no kindly old wizards, it did not arc to final battles of good and evil. It was a young woman crawling through a decaying urban landscape fenced off from the outside world, searching for her disappeared brother. It was a small packet of horror, an amalgam of decaying New York of the 70’s and 80’s and closed off Jewish ghettoes of the holocaust, it was stories of middle class civilization chewing itself to death. And there it was on the green gunmetal shelving next to Auden, ignored by the librarians and the few students who ventured into the library.
With their stark covers, slim two hundred page sizes and odors of years in public libraries Auster books were a very different species from the chunky five hundred page dragon and wizard splashed epics I'd been lugging around years before. But they both had self contained worlds churning beneath their covers. To move through Auster writing is to stare at the eternal strangeness of the human universe, a series of shocks and chances that twist and warp the characters into strange new shapes by the end of the book, so that they are left alone, blinking at their lives and calmly thinking “how did I get here?” His books are peopled with men and women possessed by ideas, ideas that shifted the world around them. Mr. Auster will descend into the story to talk with them himself, discuss their goals and fears. But essentially they are calm, stoic and resourceful against the horrors around them. Here was adulthood, here was responsibility, staring down the horrors of life. I would close Auster books a little bit older than when I started them, a little bit warped and weathered for the experience.
It was all so New York, all so literary, so liberated, so fucking ex.
uh.
stential.
4. Immigration.
And it was after handing in my visa application that I settled down to Paul Auster again: a new edition of one of his novels from the late eighties. It was wrapped in a sexy new cover, solid black stripes crowding across a photograph of a Brooklyn tenement. Here was another small bomb left ticking on the shelf.
That strange logics of the book were doing laps around my head as I headed back to the immigration bureau on a Monday morning, my college diploma and two passport size photos in hand. In all my haste to get the application in, I had forgotten these two essential components. I fear bureaucracy like a computer, one typo throwing the entire process into spasms of error messages and barred entry. I learned to type a long time ago, but I haven’t renewed my passport yet.
I suppose all the visa issues that had built up over the weekend burst out on Monday morning. It was a press of bodies, a loud, brassy, and distinctly un-Japanese mob of Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians and Filipinos dotted with a few black and white faces. I left a small space between the family in front of me to let people pass through and was promptly cut off by a fierce looking Thai woman. The Chinese family protested helplessly in confused Japanese as the immigration official curtly tried to explain that Mom would not be able to join them in Japan. This went on for a few minutes, the father and daughter eventually leaving with rain clouds circling their heads, Mom no closer to them than we they walked in. The Thai woman finished her business quickly and I stepped up to the counter.
Maybe it was just imagination, but the face of the woman behind the counter seemed to curl into a genuine smile as I approached, something reserved for the handful of white folks who make their way through this immigration bureau. I asked her where I should submit my diploma and pictures, which launched us into a brief debate on visa application procedure. In my favor I had two passport size photos, a copy of my diploma, and all the shit my friend had told me. In her favor she had a few decades of experience working for immigration. I was pretty confident of winning, but somehow her age and experience in visa applications trumped my youth and hearsay, so I left with my college diploma and two regulation size passport photos, no closer to my visa than when I walked in. I wandered to the mega-bookstore next door and browsed the long rows of paperback fiction. They were grouped by publisher into uniformed little squadrons, height and length regulated, spines all a single color. I picked out a book of short stories by a mystery writer I knew, buying it for a few hundred yen.
5. Reading Japanese.
Every book leaves an aftertaste. The fantasy novels were M&Ms and cans of Coca-Cola, leaving you thirstier and hungrier than when you started. I would finish each one on a quivering sugar-high, too pepped up to think beyond the sequel. I finished Auster books satiated, the tastes of pepper and salmon lolling around my tongue. You don’t close a book simply full, your body has just emerged from a bath of sensations. Dreams and symbols digesting in your mind, moving into the bloodstream, into your bones and out your ass. The cells in our bodies regenerate completely every few years along similar patterns, how often do our minds regenerate?
Speech and language are hard wired into the brain, God’s anonymous little gift to the baby shower, but writing and letters were made by human magic, scratches willed into life. They bear the contradictions of their makers, are in need of constant tinkering and adjustments, follow the laws we give them. Speaking always flows in the same direction in time, but words can move in any direction through space, English words stacked in horizontal brick rows, peppered with periods, commas, exclamation marks, Arabic drifting from right to left in continuous smoky curls, Chinese characters dangling top to bottom in long beaded curtains unbroken by spacing or punctuation.
Five years ago I embarked on an expedition outside the English language and into the shifting urban jungles of Japanese. Even as I made my first tentative forays into speaking (“Is this a pencil?” “The post office is across the street.”), their written counterparts always seemed much more mysterious and sexy, long draping columns made of thorny little symbols. The promise of diving into the raw, untranslated literature of a country removed from the winds of European thought would be like walking on the moon, testing out the altered physics and fingering the dust of another planet.
A friend once told me that after English Japanese is the most published language in the world; the language of 120 million island dwellers living on the edge of the world beating out French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian. I don’t know if this is true, but it rings true. While the thousand tentacle branches of national and local governments do their part to flood the world in Japanese documents, the publishing industry is no slacker, with at least a dozen telephone book size comic publications coming out every week, succeeded by a rich array of novels and histories, quietly consumed in train cars and rackety bedrooms. I had unknowingly leapt into one of the largest linguistic oceans in the world.
After a year or so spent deciphering the speech bubbles of comics I dove into the deep end of the pool, flailing my way through an extended essay by Haruku Murakami on his whiskey tasting trip through Scotland and Ireland. When I emerged grasping at the other end I checked myself, I swallowed the taste in my mouth. It was raw and wooly, with overtones of Auster’s clear polished intelligence and clarity but shot through with smoky little bits of poetry. He had squeezed these symbols into extistence and they had shone off the page, burning images of Scottish distilleries, wild Celtic drivers on country lanes and old men trading stories over glasses of single malt whiskeys. The first Japanese book I had read told me about life in the British isles, where they speak English anyway. Oh well.
6. The Big Day.
Here pasta was a big part of my diet and I’d run out of fucking olive oil. I had a whole cupboard stuffed with vinegars, soy sauces, dried pastas, and all I could think about was olive oil. But what if I was moving in two weeks? What would happen to that sweet golden syrup? I couldn’t just chuck it down the drain. And hell, all my friends around here live at home, they don’t even cook. I mean, I suppose I could do without it for a few weeks but goddamnit I wanted to dip my bread in herbed olive oil. Actually, the brown rice seemed to be getting low too, and they only sell brown rice in five kilo bags at the supermarket. I was dropping money left and right on histories of Japanese sake and George Orwell essays, but somehow I couldn’t spring for a bottle of fucking olive oil. I needed to start cleaning out that cupboard. It was good the postcard came when it did or I’d have been forced to stomach strange pasta sauces of red miso and black rice vinegar.
They said it would take a month, but the postcard had arrived after two weeks, requesting my presence down at the immigration bureau sometime before August 19th. I knew it. The whole application had been so riddled with holes and pockmarks they had taken one look at it and tossed it in the “Denial” bin with a cynical laugh. It would be better to just head in and get the whole damn thing over which I resolved to do the next Monday, when I had the whole day off.
My eyes fluttered open on Monday morning and I turned over the idea of heading to immigration or reading another chapter in the mystery novel I was reading. I recalled the press I’d experienced the last time I’d been down and decide to wait til the afternoon. Besides, the detective had finally located the apartment shown in the video of the missing girl. I would much rather spend the morning trailing the victim’s ex-boyfriend with private investigator Miro Murano than have my rejection summarily handed to me among screaming babies and lines of other foreign nationals desperate for a work visa.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon by the time I’d put the thing down and gone outside for a walk. I hadn’t eaten anything besides a quick breakfast, so I threw together a lunch of tofu and soba noodles, letting it settle in my stomach with a cup of tea. But now it was a little after three, and the place closed at four. Well, gee, guess I couldn’t make it that day, and I hafta work tomorrow...
Tuesday came and went, my mind was less preoccupied with the visa situation than with whether Miro was starting to fall for the film producer who was starting to look a lot like the perpetrator. Wednesday morning was wide open, and I resolved to go just after I’d found out who the mysterious woman was that seemed to be paying Miro’s employer large sums of cash. And so the morning disappeared. I was feeling vaguely ill when I left for work, body bored and restless from sitting with a book all morning, mind desperately burrowing into the novel and refusing to acknowledge any slighter larger issues that it might be better to start considering. Thursday morning and I had fifteen pages left and no excuse. Miro found the poor girl recovering in a hospital room, her mother having thrown herself out a fifth story window after confessing to killing her former lover in order to protect her marriage to the wealthy industrial heir. Miro had finally waded through all the lies and counter-lies to arrive at this hospital bed, the nineteen year old girl reading comics to shut out the cruelty that had been dogging her from page one. I closed the book and felt its last few lines bounce around my head, the detective walking through the empty hallway, tired and exhausted from confronting the world of human greed and lies for four hundred and thirteen pages, but walking away with the grim satisfaction of having confronted the world with open eyes. “Hey Jamie!” the world was screaming, “Get your ass down to immigration!”
I took a number and sat down on the padded benches they had laid out as a waiting room. It wasn’t so busy today, just a few Korean families and a score of nervous looking Iranians. I read the posters as I waited. Security camera photos of a Chinese man wanted for questioning on burglary and assault. An impossibly cute claymation woman in an immigration officers uniform gave me the rundown on recent changes in visa law. “Spousal visas have been extended to five year terms!” “Always bring four thousand yen for your visa processing fee!” “Remember, all violations can be punished by deportation and a ban from the country for up to seven years!” I finished that one when my number was called.
“Okay great, can I have your passport please? Excellent, here’s your one year working visa, make sure to head down to your local city hall in the next two weeks to register the changes on your ID card. Thank you very much for coming to the immigration bureau today NEXT!” And that was that.
7. One Last Thing.
I was bursting to tell someone the news so I hurried out past the book megastore down to a nearby imported grocery store where a friend works. I looked up and down the aisles for her but it looked like she had the morning off. I was just about to leave when my eyes fell on a rack of extra virgin olive oil discounted 20%. I had cooking to do.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
dog days
Today we slithered out from under typhoon number 7, hopefully the last in the Pacific’s annual attempts to skydive onto the Japanese archipelago. Half the shoes stacked by my door were mushy and dripping this morning, so they got set for a full day of drying out on my balcony along with my freshly laundered sheets and half a dozen pairs of red socks. What can I say, I like red socks. Perfect laundry weather, the grid of windows in my apartment block speckled with fluttering eggshell sheets and slate gray futons slung over railings. It was like someone had turned a key in the back of my spine, unlocking the ramrod posture I’d developed after a few weeks of walking under umbrellas. Although the storm has sucked away a lot of the humidity with it, there is still a veil of moisture in the air, just waiting to congeal back into the spongy days of August.
Like all the seasons, summer has a small universe of icons in Japan, from the relentless metallic scree of cicadas to fireworks festivals and squares of cloth to wipe the sweat off your neck. Not a small number summer standbys are pushed on by relentless advertising. Models frolic in bikinis and repose in light summer yukatas, grinning at you from skyscrapers and train platforms. Real-estate firms and loan agencies hand out plastic fans on street corners emblazoned with their company info. The interiors of entire subway cars are splashed with beer adverts. Beer is exclusively a hot-weather drink in Japan. I read an article in the Japan Times last year that said the big three beer brewers all had formulas that could accurately predict their beer sales on any given day in July or August given the temperature that day. The higher the heat, the more beer sold.
Japan seems to be pretty unconcerned with this intersection of commerce and tradition; the fact is, they have been intertwined here a lot longer than the West. It has been estimated that in the 18th and 19th century Edo had a population of around one million people, making it the largest city in the world at the time, only London coming close. Like all cities of a certain size, it wasn’t simply a gathering of elites living off their country estates, but a sprawling center of merchants, craftsmen and laborers, inventing their own traditions around the rhythms of commerce. Today (July 28th) is the vestige of one of those holidays, Doyo no Ushi no Hi.
It’s no secret that Hallmark invented Mother’s Day and Father’s Day around the turn of the century to sell cards and Valentine’s Day was dug up by chocolatiers to hawk sweets. But Japan has been doing it for centuries, Doyo no Ushi no Hi having been concocted sometime in the 18th century as a way to sell grilled eel to a populace that didn’t have the disposable cash to throw away it’s rice money on a middle class delicacy. And make no doubt about it, unagi (grilled eel), is a fucking delicacy. Specific methods vary, but the basic idea is to alternately steam and grill slices of eel flesh over hot coals, gradually applying layer upon layer of a thick, sweet sauce. The results are dark golden brown strips of flesh as soft as foie gras, but unbelievably light and refreshing. Unagi is supposedly loaded with all sorts of nutrients sweated out during the summer months, when its sales peak. Out of the price range of your average laboring family at the time, Doyo no Ushi no Hi was the day to save for, a day to break the daily soy-bean and rice routine to savor the luxurious flavors of unagi at the height of summer. Which is why supermarket fish sections are overflowing with saran-wrapped trays of grilled eel, and unagi restaurants will have lunch lines around the block today.
Like all the seasons, summer has a small universe of icons in Japan, from the relentless metallic scree of cicadas to fireworks festivals and squares of cloth to wipe the sweat off your neck. Not a small number summer standbys are pushed on by relentless advertising. Models frolic in bikinis and repose in light summer yukatas, grinning at you from skyscrapers and train platforms. Real-estate firms and loan agencies hand out plastic fans on street corners emblazoned with their company info. The interiors of entire subway cars are splashed with beer adverts. Beer is exclusively a hot-weather drink in Japan. I read an article in the Japan Times last year that said the big three beer brewers all had formulas that could accurately predict their beer sales on any given day in July or August given the temperature that day. The higher the heat, the more beer sold.
Japan seems to be pretty unconcerned with this intersection of commerce and tradition; the fact is, they have been intertwined here a lot longer than the West. It has been estimated that in the 18th and 19th century Edo had a population of around one million people, making it the largest city in the world at the time, only London coming close. Like all cities of a certain size, it wasn’t simply a gathering of elites living off their country estates, but a sprawling center of merchants, craftsmen and laborers, inventing their own traditions around the rhythms of commerce. Today (July 28th) is the vestige of one of those holidays, Doyo no Ushi no Hi.
It’s no secret that Hallmark invented Mother’s Day and Father’s Day around the turn of the century to sell cards and Valentine’s Day was dug up by chocolatiers to hawk sweets. But Japan has been doing it for centuries, Doyo no Ushi no Hi having been concocted sometime in the 18th century as a way to sell grilled eel to a populace that didn’t have the disposable cash to throw away it’s rice money on a middle class delicacy. And make no doubt about it, unagi (grilled eel), is a fucking delicacy. Specific methods vary, but the basic idea is to alternately steam and grill slices of eel flesh over hot coals, gradually applying layer upon layer of a thick, sweet sauce. The results are dark golden brown strips of flesh as soft as foie gras, but unbelievably light and refreshing. Unagi is supposedly loaded with all sorts of nutrients sweated out during the summer months, when its sales peak. Out of the price range of your average laboring family at the time, Doyo no Ushi no Hi was the day to save for, a day to break the daily soy-bean and rice routine to savor the luxurious flavors of unagi at the height of summer. Which is why supermarket fish sections are overflowing with saran-wrapped trays of grilled eel, and unagi restaurants will have lunch lines around the block today.
Friday, July 22, 2005
being twenty-five
How old are you anyway?
Twenty-five.
Really, I’m twenty-five. I dunno, you look older.
I get that a lot.
But I think the essence of being twenty-five is you always look older than twenty-five. How long ago was it when we were in our early twenties, toeing into jobs and speaking the language of adults but not really knowing it. I might say six hundred a month is a good deal on that apartment, but fuck, who believes paying six hundred dollars a month is a good deal for anything? But if you’re earning two thousand a month it’s not so bad, and you can still go out for beers or a proper restaurant every once in a while and, hey, who’s to tell you how to spend your money? I mean hell, I’m making two thousand dollars a month. Which I know isn’t that much for a college grad, but if you’d told the sixteen year old me he could be making two thousand dollars a month and after rent, groceries and debts he could do whatever he wanted with it, I think he’d be pretty damned excited. And then at some point when we weren’t watching it just became our language, and we realized, fuck, this is our world! It’s our turn!
But you know what made me think of all this. I was at this club in Tokyo where two twenty-five year old friends were doing this electronica show using a rack of sequencers and obscure devices they’d dug out of bargain bins in Akihabara. Before them these two British guys (both twenty-five) did a hip-hop set, and after them a skinny Japanese guy (who looked twenty-five) did this great set of clicks and beats on his laptop. And earlier in the evening a friend had everyone he knew there together in a circle and made them say how they old they were when they first got laid, and we were all twenty-five and we’d all been laid. There were all these people that said fifteen and sixteen and you can see them remembering it as they talk and wondering where that person is now, how they are doing at twenty-five, but there was this one shy little couple and they both answered twenty-five and after everyone else it was just about the sweetest thing you could imagine.
I remember going to jazz clubs as a sixteen year old music freak and looking at these strange creatures who drank calmly, knowledgably, habitually, and they would probably all go back to their city apartments to make love or kiss on street corners and do things like that and here I was drinking ginger ale with my nineteen year old buddy (in college!), and we were just there for the music, y'know. But here I am, twenty-five at the club, sitting and talking to the girl behind the bar and ignoring the musicians, and even the musicians are ignoring the musicians.
There was this girl down at the edge of the bar who looked twenty-seven and had her hair up and this classic black dress and heels on amid all these baseball hats. She looked like she'd stepped out of a Dashiell Hammet mystery, trading double entendres with Sam Spade. But you know, not like she wanted to step out of a novel, but that she already had. She'd been flirting with just about every guy in the place and they all knew her and knew her routine and they just talked but I was the new guy, so she talked to me. And we were just making conversation, and she was a bit loud, a bit pushy, but she was alright, pretty much everything wrapped up for her, she had her steady job and her dress and her Friday night and a new guy to talk to. And she asked, or I asked:
How old are you anyway?
Twenty-five.
Really, I’m twenty-five. I dunno, you look older.
I get that a lot.
Twenty-five.
Really, I’m twenty-five. I dunno, you look older.
I get that a lot.
But I think the essence of being twenty-five is you always look older than twenty-five. How long ago was it when we were in our early twenties, toeing into jobs and speaking the language of adults but not really knowing it. I might say six hundred a month is a good deal on that apartment, but fuck, who believes paying six hundred dollars a month is a good deal for anything? But if you’re earning two thousand a month it’s not so bad, and you can still go out for beers or a proper restaurant every once in a while and, hey, who’s to tell you how to spend your money? I mean hell, I’m making two thousand dollars a month. Which I know isn’t that much for a college grad, but if you’d told the sixteen year old me he could be making two thousand dollars a month and after rent, groceries and debts he could do whatever he wanted with it, I think he’d be pretty damned excited. And then at some point when we weren’t watching it just became our language, and we realized, fuck, this is our world! It’s our turn!
But you know what made me think of all this. I was at this club in Tokyo where two twenty-five year old friends were doing this electronica show using a rack of sequencers and obscure devices they’d dug out of bargain bins in Akihabara. Before them these two British guys (both twenty-five) did a hip-hop set, and after them a skinny Japanese guy (who looked twenty-five) did this great set of clicks and beats on his laptop. And earlier in the evening a friend had everyone he knew there together in a circle and made them say how they old they were when they first got laid, and we were all twenty-five and we’d all been laid. There were all these people that said fifteen and sixteen and you can see them remembering it as they talk and wondering where that person is now, how they are doing at twenty-five, but there was this one shy little couple and they both answered twenty-five and after everyone else it was just about the sweetest thing you could imagine.
I remember going to jazz clubs as a sixteen year old music freak and looking at these strange creatures who drank calmly, knowledgably, habitually, and they would probably all go back to their city apartments to make love or kiss on street corners and do things like that and here I was drinking ginger ale with my nineteen year old buddy (in college!), and we were just there for the music, y'know. But here I am, twenty-five at the club, sitting and talking to the girl behind the bar and ignoring the musicians, and even the musicians are ignoring the musicians.
There was this girl down at the edge of the bar who looked twenty-seven and had her hair up and this classic black dress and heels on amid all these baseball hats. She looked like she'd stepped out of a Dashiell Hammet mystery, trading double entendres with Sam Spade. But you know, not like she wanted to step out of a novel, but that she already had. She'd been flirting with just about every guy in the place and they all knew her and knew her routine and they just talked but I was the new guy, so she talked to me. And we were just making conversation, and she was a bit loud, a bit pushy, but she was alright, pretty much everything wrapped up for her, she had her steady job and her dress and her Friday night and a new guy to talk to. And she asked, or I asked:
How old are you anyway?
Twenty-five.
Really, I’m twenty-five. I dunno, you look older.
I get that a lot.
best japanese t-shirt in english i've seen recently
Young girl maybe eighteen years old strutting down a Tokyo street with a purple shirt stamped in plain white letters:
No shirt,
No shoes,
No juicy.
Prize to anyone who can explain that one to me.
No shirt,
No shoes,
No juicy.
Prize to anyone who can explain that one to me.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
watermelon run
Yokozawa-san stepped back to light a cigarette as Kaneko-san and I squeezed the last plastic crate onto the flat bed truck. The late afternoon sky was ribbed with white streaks and framed by the thick, chewy green of mountains in late July. We paused to check the fully packed truck. The crates were stacked three high, four wide, and at least six or seven deep, each one scrawled with the name of the farmer responsible for the contents. Six or seven watermelons to a crate, with two set aside for pumpkins and cucumbers. The payload just edged over the one ton limit written above the license plate. Our bags would have to ride on top, tucked between the top crates and a heavy plastic tarp. I had images of us shooting along the highway, the extra weight throwing us over a curve, skulls and melons bursting on impact, red juices running along the blacktop.
“Try not to get caught!” Yokozawa said, a barky alto laugh squeezing out of his stocky farmer’s body. I didn’t really know what he meant.
I had lived in Isazawa for a few months at the end of last year, staying with the Kaneko family and working at their soba restaurant. Isazawa is an unassuming little valley in Japan’s north country blessed with pristine water and a thick red soil that can run the color of blood when it rains. A few dozen farming families have blanketed the soil with crops; apple orchards, grape lattices and large wooden frames for hops line the rivers and roads. It’s the contracts with department stores and big companies that keep these small farmers alive. Cash crops of hops are sold to Kirin for beer, the apples shipped off to shops and customers who have been buying for generations, and the grapes sold in high end department stores. There may be a few plots of summer vegetables, but most of what makes it to the dinner table will be from the super market.
Kaneko-san is a knotty little gnome of a man, an eccentric among this valley of cash crops farmers with their new Toyotas and remodeled houses. He tends a dozen or so patches of potatoes, pumpkins, corn and soy beans sold for trifles at the local farmers market while his neighbor may simply tend a wide orchard of high grade apples to sell in Tokyo. It’s whispered around the valley that the guy has a lot of money tucked away, saved from years of working in town selling electronics. I had to drag that little bit of information out of him, he doesn’t talk about the past very much, too busy scurrying around on his plots of organic land, trying to better organize the local farmers market, find new markets for Isazawa produce. He is the unofficial head of the farmers cooperative, his eyes always squinting past the myriad of daily chores to an unvoiced goal. He loves this valley, loves the people in it, loves the life they live, and sees it slowly slipping away, the children going to work in factories in town or disappearing into the cities. The farming families of Isazawa have it easier than most folks out in the country, their valley grows fruits of unbelievable quality. But like all small farms they are perched on the edge of an abyss. A new market could mean everything.
With this in mind we’d piled the truck high with crates of watermelons, throwing a few boxes of plums and eggplants pickled by a local housewife. A fresh Japanese watermelon the size of a volleyball can sell for close to ten bucks in Tokyo. Apparently some of the black watermelons from the far north in Hokkaido can go for sixty bucks. Isazawa had never tried to sell their dark heavy melons any farther than the valley, the farmers coop might be able to double their money down in Tokyo, selling better fruit at the same price, no middle man.
We left at the gun running hour of one in the morning, blinking ourselves awake after three hours of sleep. The yellowy moon was just a few slivers shy of being full. There were three of us in the front cab: a pudgy farmwife named Machida squeezed between me and Kaneko-san. She chattered on about mountain roads and what she made for dinner last night while Kaneko squinted behind the steering wheel and I scrunched by the passenger door invent new ways to tie my legs into knots.
Machida didn’t really let up for a few hours, Kaneko nodding through her rambling. I drifted in and out of sleep. We flew through the city of Yonezawa to pick up the freeway, Machida remarking she’d lived here for a little while in high school when her Dad found work near here, but they soon moved back to Isazawa. “But you’ve always lived in Isazawa, right Kaneko-san?” Even though her speech was littered with local phrases it was a lot clearer than most Isazawa folks, who speak with mouths pursed tight, muddying up their words. Local joke is that it’s so cold up here no one wants to open their mouths too wide.
“No, wasn’t born in Isazawa.” My ears perked up at that one. She pressed him on it.
“Born in Manchukuo when the Japanese empire was over there. Dad had a job as a local policeman, was planning to get some land, start a farm. Left when I was about six. Everyone pressing to get out of the country, it was... incredible. Was with my mother and sisters, only met up with my father by chance at the port. Otherwise… who knows. Came back to Isazaawa.” He blinked a few times. Machida made a few comments about how terrible war was and he just nodded. “If Koizumi keeps up with this whole Iraq thing...I just don’t know.”
I woke up to find us jammed on the entrance ramp to a Tokyo freeway, three lanes crammed with morning commuters. The air was thick and wooly, and the sky the color of wet paper. I worried about the fruit jostling behind us, imagined it turning gray in the sticky Tokyo smog. Kaneko was still at the wheel, face still stony and squinting, Machida, hunched over a small library of maps. We trundled off the highway, three rubes and a full ton of melons screeching around Tokyo backstreets on rush hour. We trundled into central Shinjuku, signs and stores screaming at the thousands of commuters pumping in and out of express trains and local buses. We gawked out while waiting at the stop light. Just three days outside this mess made it seem grimy, fresh and terrifying. “If you got everyone together in Isazawa for the summer festival, you still wouldn't...” Kaneko’s voice trailed off.
By nine o’clock we had dropped off Machida and half the produce on a small two way street nestled in a neighborhood of take-out restaurants and apartment blocks. We stacked the crates on a creaking wooden deck fronting a neighborhood bar-restaurant. The door was hung with sign scrawled in red and black magic markers: “Wednesday, July 20th, Watermelons direct from Yamagata!”
Kaneko and I curved through another tangle of one way streets and wrong turns, getting stuck in neighborhoods where not even the cops could give us decent directions. We spent close to forty minutes four blocks from our destination, stuck in a neighborhood designed by a four-year-old drawing a plate of spaghetti. We pulled into the apartment complex over an hour late, the street fair already underway. Between the parking lots and apartment lobbies a tree shaded path was lined with frumpy old women selling juice boxes and handcrafts. The local tenants association had hobbled this little event together, housewives in aprons and wide rimmed hats bowing and smiling as they scurried amid the tarps and folding tables.
We set up quickly across from a sour looking guy selling used clothing on blue tarps. Next to us there was a Chiba farmer with crates of free range eggs and two women in their forties selling organic teas and flavored honeys. As soon as we set down our crates we were swarmed by gaggles of housewives, the older grandmas thumping the bottom of melons listening for irregularities, younger moms with toddlers watching on. They squinted at the melons, trying to figure out just how big they could buy and still have it fit into the fridge between the cabbage and the daikon.
Once the fuss had died down we cut up a few samples, laying out thick slices on a tray. Kaneko-san excused himself and went back to the truck to collapse for an hour or so, leaving me to make change and pull in the customers with a lilting voice. “Fresh watermelons, straight from Yamagata! Try a slice of these delicious watermelons!” A skinny old guy with shock white hair and coke-bottle glasses shuffled up to me, staring at the melons and pumpkins and the skinny white guy behind them. “You come all the way from the states to sell these watermelons?” he asked me in nearly flawless English. Kids on summer vacation eyed the watermelon slices shyly and checked with me two or three times that it was really okay to try one. The grandmas weren’t as shy, munching on the samples and delicately spitting seeds into a plastic bin.
Eyes widened at the taste, sweet and rich as candy. We’ve all grown used to sucking the watery juice from feeble pink footballs, but these watermelons were a whole ‘nother animal. Little kids giggled and chewed down to the rind, breaking into little arguments over whether it was sweeter than a watermelon lollipop. Old folks sighed, “I haven’t had a watermelon like this in years...”
By four o’clock we were left counting bills among stacks of empty crates. The egg man had sold all his produce a few hours before and left with a flurry of bows and name cards passed around. The women selling organic teas gave us a free packs of locally grown Darjeeling and a pamphlet for their natural foods store.
By five we were back with Machida at the restaurant, packing empty crates and leftovers onto the truck. The same scooters and sedans we’d tangled with that morning flying back in the opposite direction, missing us by finger breadths as we fastened down the tarp. Once the truck was safely parked at a friend’s place and we’d washed our faces the three of us tumbled into the restaurant into a small sideroom with a low wooden table and a “Reserved” sign. We sat down to chilled mugs of beer and platters of raw fish with a smattering of friends and partners who had helped to put the watermelon run together. I found myself next to a graduate student in environmental agriculture I’d met at Kaneko-san’s last October and I harangued him into explain exactly what he was studying, which he was all hedgy about. “Actually, it’s all super specialized, I don’t quite get it yet,” he said sheepishly.
Kaneko was soon onto cups of chilled sake and plying a local friend on the best places to find wild mushrooms in Saitama, his face occasionally twisting into a gnarly smile. The conversation swung to liquor brands, with the student and I trying to decipher how to read the names of the different sake brands. I asked Kaneko which one he thought would be good and his face scrunched the way it does when he’s checking the ripeness of pumpkins. “I don’t really think brands mean that much,” he said, his voice slipping to the muddy Isazawa accent he’d been suppressing all day. “If it’s made locally, fresh, the day before, it’ll be good sake.” He started munching on a piece of fried eggplant, which was tasteless next to the gorgeous purple chunks we’d eaten with our dinner the night before. The talk turned to good liquor stores in Tokyo, wandering into soccer, sumo and places to go in northern Japan as our heads grew heavier.
The grad student and I had trains to catch, gathering our bags together. Kaneko saw us off at the door, handing us each a couple of watermelons that could also be used as bowling balls before eating. He came out to point the way to the station, and I asked why he seemed to know this neighborhood so well.
“Lived here for three years when I was younger. Worked in a factory over there making motorcycle parts. It’s an apartment complex now. So yeah, thanks for today, take care, bye bye.” He ducked back into the restaurant with a gnarly smile as the student and I glanced at each other, eyes wide. We talked about him as we staggered down to the station, hands loaded with fruit, heads heavy with sake.
“Try not to get caught!” Yokozawa said, a barky alto laugh squeezing out of his stocky farmer’s body. I didn’t really know what he meant.
I had lived in Isazawa for a few months at the end of last year, staying with the Kaneko family and working at their soba restaurant. Isazawa is an unassuming little valley in Japan’s north country blessed with pristine water and a thick red soil that can run the color of blood when it rains. A few dozen farming families have blanketed the soil with crops; apple orchards, grape lattices and large wooden frames for hops line the rivers and roads. It’s the contracts with department stores and big companies that keep these small farmers alive. Cash crops of hops are sold to Kirin for beer, the apples shipped off to shops and customers who have been buying for generations, and the grapes sold in high end department stores. There may be a few plots of summer vegetables, but most of what makes it to the dinner table will be from the super market.
Kaneko-san is a knotty little gnome of a man, an eccentric among this valley of cash crops farmers with their new Toyotas and remodeled houses. He tends a dozen or so patches of potatoes, pumpkins, corn and soy beans sold for trifles at the local farmers market while his neighbor may simply tend a wide orchard of high grade apples to sell in Tokyo. It’s whispered around the valley that the guy has a lot of money tucked away, saved from years of working in town selling electronics. I had to drag that little bit of information out of him, he doesn’t talk about the past very much, too busy scurrying around on his plots of organic land, trying to better organize the local farmers market, find new markets for Isazawa produce. He is the unofficial head of the farmers cooperative, his eyes always squinting past the myriad of daily chores to an unvoiced goal. He loves this valley, loves the people in it, loves the life they live, and sees it slowly slipping away, the children going to work in factories in town or disappearing into the cities. The farming families of Isazawa have it easier than most folks out in the country, their valley grows fruits of unbelievable quality. But like all small farms they are perched on the edge of an abyss. A new market could mean everything.
With this in mind we’d piled the truck high with crates of watermelons, throwing a few boxes of plums and eggplants pickled by a local housewife. A fresh Japanese watermelon the size of a volleyball can sell for close to ten bucks in Tokyo. Apparently some of the black watermelons from the far north in Hokkaido can go for sixty bucks. Isazawa had never tried to sell their dark heavy melons any farther than the valley, the farmers coop might be able to double their money down in Tokyo, selling better fruit at the same price, no middle man.
We left at the gun running hour of one in the morning, blinking ourselves awake after three hours of sleep. The yellowy moon was just a few slivers shy of being full. There were three of us in the front cab: a pudgy farmwife named Machida squeezed between me and Kaneko-san. She chattered on about mountain roads and what she made for dinner last night while Kaneko squinted behind the steering wheel and I scrunched by the passenger door invent new ways to tie my legs into knots.
Machida didn’t really let up for a few hours, Kaneko nodding through her rambling. I drifted in and out of sleep. We flew through the city of Yonezawa to pick up the freeway, Machida remarking she’d lived here for a little while in high school when her Dad found work near here, but they soon moved back to Isazawa. “But you’ve always lived in Isazawa, right Kaneko-san?” Even though her speech was littered with local phrases it was a lot clearer than most Isazawa folks, who speak with mouths pursed tight, muddying up their words. Local joke is that it’s so cold up here no one wants to open their mouths too wide.
“No, wasn’t born in Isazawa.” My ears perked up at that one. She pressed him on it.
“Born in Manchukuo when the Japanese empire was over there. Dad had a job as a local policeman, was planning to get some land, start a farm. Left when I was about six. Everyone pressing to get out of the country, it was... incredible. Was with my mother and sisters, only met up with my father by chance at the port. Otherwise… who knows. Came back to Isazaawa.” He blinked a few times. Machida made a few comments about how terrible war was and he just nodded. “If Koizumi keeps up with this whole Iraq thing...I just don’t know.”
I woke up to find us jammed on the entrance ramp to a Tokyo freeway, three lanes crammed with morning commuters. The air was thick and wooly, and the sky the color of wet paper. I worried about the fruit jostling behind us, imagined it turning gray in the sticky Tokyo smog. Kaneko was still at the wheel, face still stony and squinting, Machida, hunched over a small library of maps. We trundled off the highway, three rubes and a full ton of melons screeching around Tokyo backstreets on rush hour. We trundled into central Shinjuku, signs and stores screaming at the thousands of commuters pumping in and out of express trains and local buses. We gawked out while waiting at the stop light. Just three days outside this mess made it seem grimy, fresh and terrifying. “If you got everyone together in Isazawa for the summer festival, you still wouldn't...” Kaneko’s voice trailed off.
By nine o’clock we had dropped off Machida and half the produce on a small two way street nestled in a neighborhood of take-out restaurants and apartment blocks. We stacked the crates on a creaking wooden deck fronting a neighborhood bar-restaurant. The door was hung with sign scrawled in red and black magic markers: “Wednesday, July 20th, Watermelons direct from Yamagata!”
Kaneko and I curved through another tangle of one way streets and wrong turns, getting stuck in neighborhoods where not even the cops could give us decent directions. We spent close to forty minutes four blocks from our destination, stuck in a neighborhood designed by a four-year-old drawing a plate of spaghetti. We pulled into the apartment complex over an hour late, the street fair already underway. Between the parking lots and apartment lobbies a tree shaded path was lined with frumpy old women selling juice boxes and handcrafts. The local tenants association had hobbled this little event together, housewives in aprons and wide rimmed hats bowing and smiling as they scurried amid the tarps and folding tables.
We set up quickly across from a sour looking guy selling used clothing on blue tarps. Next to us there was a Chiba farmer with crates of free range eggs and two women in their forties selling organic teas and flavored honeys. As soon as we set down our crates we were swarmed by gaggles of housewives, the older grandmas thumping the bottom of melons listening for irregularities, younger moms with toddlers watching on. They squinted at the melons, trying to figure out just how big they could buy and still have it fit into the fridge between the cabbage and the daikon.
Once the fuss had died down we cut up a few samples, laying out thick slices on a tray. Kaneko-san excused himself and went back to the truck to collapse for an hour or so, leaving me to make change and pull in the customers with a lilting voice. “Fresh watermelons, straight from Yamagata! Try a slice of these delicious watermelons!” A skinny old guy with shock white hair and coke-bottle glasses shuffled up to me, staring at the melons and pumpkins and the skinny white guy behind them. “You come all the way from the states to sell these watermelons?” he asked me in nearly flawless English. Kids on summer vacation eyed the watermelon slices shyly and checked with me two or three times that it was really okay to try one. The grandmas weren’t as shy, munching on the samples and delicately spitting seeds into a plastic bin.
Eyes widened at the taste, sweet and rich as candy. We’ve all grown used to sucking the watery juice from feeble pink footballs, but these watermelons were a whole ‘nother animal. Little kids giggled and chewed down to the rind, breaking into little arguments over whether it was sweeter than a watermelon lollipop. Old folks sighed, “I haven’t had a watermelon like this in years...”
By four o’clock we were left counting bills among stacks of empty crates. The egg man had sold all his produce a few hours before and left with a flurry of bows and name cards passed around. The women selling organic teas gave us a free packs of locally grown Darjeeling and a pamphlet for their natural foods store.
By five we were back with Machida at the restaurant, packing empty crates and leftovers onto the truck. The same scooters and sedans we’d tangled with that morning flying back in the opposite direction, missing us by finger breadths as we fastened down the tarp. Once the truck was safely parked at a friend’s place and we’d washed our faces the three of us tumbled into the restaurant into a small sideroom with a low wooden table and a “Reserved” sign. We sat down to chilled mugs of beer and platters of raw fish with a smattering of friends and partners who had helped to put the watermelon run together. I found myself next to a graduate student in environmental agriculture I’d met at Kaneko-san’s last October and I harangued him into explain exactly what he was studying, which he was all hedgy about. “Actually, it’s all super specialized, I don’t quite get it yet,” he said sheepishly.
Kaneko was soon onto cups of chilled sake and plying a local friend on the best places to find wild mushrooms in Saitama, his face occasionally twisting into a gnarly smile. The conversation swung to liquor brands, with the student and I trying to decipher how to read the names of the different sake brands. I asked Kaneko which one he thought would be good and his face scrunched the way it does when he’s checking the ripeness of pumpkins. “I don’t really think brands mean that much,” he said, his voice slipping to the muddy Isazawa accent he’d been suppressing all day. “If it’s made locally, fresh, the day before, it’ll be good sake.” He started munching on a piece of fried eggplant, which was tasteless next to the gorgeous purple chunks we’d eaten with our dinner the night before. The talk turned to good liquor stores in Tokyo, wandering into soccer, sumo and places to go in northern Japan as our heads grew heavier.
The grad student and I had trains to catch, gathering our bags together. Kaneko saw us off at the door, handing us each a couple of watermelons that could also be used as bowling balls before eating. He came out to point the way to the station, and I asked why he seemed to know this neighborhood so well.
“Lived here for three years when I was younger. Worked in a factory over there making motorcycle parts. It’s an apartment complex now. So yeah, thanks for today, take care, bye bye.” He ducked back into the restaurant with a gnarly smile as the student and I glanced at each other, eyes wide. We talked about him as we staggered down to the station, hands loaded with fruit, heads heavy with sake.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
a few more
Last Sunday I was reminded of a universe of Japanese gestures that I'd forgotten to put into my last post. Got all wrapped up in unsconscious bows and squatting postures. In anycase, spent last Sunday at a country barbecue. Picked up by a friend of mine, this country boy with a scruffly face whose main past times are fishing and making techo-pop on his laptop. Spent the afternoon pulling cold beers out of the river and grilling salmon steaks and mushrooms in tin foil wraps over the grill. Mostly new to me, country boys and girls. In anycase, they reminded me of a lot of the hand motions I'd forgotten about.
Extended arm, index finger hooking as if pulling a trigger: Purloining, pinching, nicking, pilfering. (Cued by Tori trying to make off with one of the expensive beers Kaneko had brought.)
Index and thumb curled in an upside-down "OK" sign: Cash, bread, wampum, yen.
Raised eyebrows plus an extended pinky: "Single?"
Thumb tucked between your index and middle finger: Getting it on.
Tapping your left shoulder with your right hand then your right with your left: Swings both ways, bi.
Extended middle finger: Absolutely nothing. Friends will scratch their nose with it while they talk to you, old men point the way to the nearest train station with it, and motorists will use it to wave you into a lane.
Extended arm, index finger hooking as if pulling a trigger: Purloining, pinching, nicking, pilfering. (Cued by Tori trying to make off with one of the expensive beers Kaneko had brought.)
Index and thumb curled in an upside-down "OK" sign: Cash, bread, wampum, yen.
Raised eyebrows plus an extended pinky: "Single?"
Thumb tucked between your index and middle finger: Getting it on.
Tapping your left shoulder with your right hand then your right with your left: Swings both ways, bi.
Extended middle finger: Absolutely nothing. Friends will scratch their nose with it while they talk to you, old men point the way to the nearest train station with it, and motorists will use it to wave you into a lane.
Monday, June 20, 2005
bows, handshakes, come hithers
kinesthetics: (subset of linguistics) a new academic field I just made up which explores and lists the physical language specific to a culture. So far research has been confined to Japan and the US, with brief expeditions to Taiwan, the UK and Canada. I should travel more.
One of my favorite modern Japanese artists is the painter and illustrator Akira Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi works in many styles, but his most well known works are his massive ink and oil paintings depicting fluid meshes of modern and feudal Japanese life in broad “Where’s Waldo?” style paintings. While at first glance identical to 17th and 18th century Japanese paintings where swathes of quickly detailed little figures were depicted parading around urban landscapes, with a closer look Yamaguchi has riddled his paintings with modern Japanese details, from electric water heaters tacked onto the sides of feudal houses to small congresses of armored samurai and suit-and-tyed businessmen. The one time-irrelevant aspect of Yamaguchi’s paintings are the postures and expressions of his little figures, which all seem so quintessentially Japanese. I occasionally have to swallow my astonishment and gulp when squinting at the details in his work – the slightly tilted head and closed eyes of a stoic looking fellow in a public bath is the distilled image of a guy I saw in the local hot springs last week: right down to the carefully folded square of a washcloth resting on his head. His paintings are a little bit overwhelming at times, crammed as they are with miniscule moments of Japanese life. His work has made him famous domestically; his fantasy illustrations of the Mitsukoshi department store were plastered on trains all over Tokyo last year as an ad for their 100th anniversary, and a recent book collection of his paintings has been prominently displayed in just about every bookstore I’ve walked into. Yamaguchi’s work has shaped my photographic expeditions around Tokyo, keeping my eye out for a flip of the wrist or a scratch of the neck that wanders from mother to son from playmate to playmate.
One of the first gestures I noticed is the way you shake hands here: stiffly, but with gusto, back arched slightly in the unconscious ghost of a bow. Though it still has faint foreign quotation marks around it, the handshake has become just another addition to the broad range of Japanese gestures.
Though probably a Chinese import, the domestic equivalent of the bow is probably the most well known gesture in the Japanese physical vocabulary. On a short trip to Taiwan last year I was surprised to note the radically different quality in bowing. It is used far less frequently and goes far less deep than Japanese bowing. I recall slow casual nods at the waist in tea-houses and restaurants which seemed worlds away from the clean and occasionally frantic twitching that goes on in Japan. There is a universe of bows and nods in Japan that exist purely in the kinesthetic memory, coming out of both conscious practice and unconscious absorption. On my walk home I frequently pass a neighborhood bar where the sliding glass walls have been opened up and tables spill out into the street. Men and women at the long tables squint, smile and nod their heads in a fashion that is universal but somehow coming out distinctly Japanese.
Certain forms of bowing are drilled into students from elementary school onwards, and sometimes earlier. It is quite an experience to introduce yourself before several hundred kindergarteners lined in exquisite rows in identical little jumpers, then to have them all bow to you in unison, collapsing into giggles afterwards. From there on bowing is worked into daily rituals. While practices vary depending on class and teachers, the more traditional start out with a barked “Kiritsu!” (Stand!), and “Rei!” (Bow!), where the entire class and the teacher will bow to one another, then begin the lesson. The practice continues up through adulthood, the beginning of just about any meeting consecrated with the entire room bowing in unison. Just about every store has a different bowing policy to its customers, from the faint nods and warm smiles from the corner produce store to the closed-eye, exquisitely angled tilts-from-the-waist at your finer restaurants.
There are of course certain gestures that are universal to the human animal, from the raising of eyebrows and contraction of cheek muscles that make up a welcoming smile to the closed hand which seems to indicate violence and strength across the board. But there are so many other twitches and flaps that are culturally specific, picked up and passed around like new words and phrases. It isn’t easy to master the subtly graded formalities of polite Japanese, but learning when and how to bow is something you pick up without thinking about. I’m pretty sure the waitstaff at US restaurants always give me a little more room as an involuntarily nod and twitch whenever they bring something to the table.
There are almost too many too list. (But hey, that’s why I’m writing this.) When heading the wrong way through a thick crowd you hold up your flat hand like a sharks fin cutting through the water. Some particularly enthusiastic old guys add a steady up-and-down chopping motion, as if cutting their way through a jungle. The hand gesture for “come here” isn’t the circular arm swing we use in the states, but kind of like a reverse of the “shoo!” gesture, hand flapping down from the wrist, pulling the person in. It is standard etiquette to hold up a flat open palm like a signal flag when you’re crossing the street. Embarrassment or shyness comes out both in a flushed face and a conspicuous scratching of the back of your neck. And while it’s a bit embarrassing to note this, schoolgirls and professional women in skirts often press their open hands to their mid thigh when walking up stairs, pressing the fabric against themselves to prevent any peeking from below. Not that I ever photographed that. The girls and the cops probably wouldn’t understand my purely anthropological interests in the subject.
Women tucking in their skirts walking up the stairs is as much a product of the physical reality of Tokyo as the cultural makeup of Japan, but there’s no real separating of the two. Short skirts and stairs in train stations are pretty common in Japan, and modesty is a natural human instinct: throw all three together and you get the cultural meme of hands tucking in skirts. These reactions to the manmade landscape are a whole subdivision of kinesthetics.
I’m always been interested in the variety of postures that emerge from sitting on flat tatami matting. While many Japanese homes feature a dinner table with chairs, venture out into the country and you’ll find homes where there isn’t a high backed chair in sight, the entire rhythm of the room lowered to the floor. With nothing to lean back on you tend to alternate between hunching forward and leaning back on your arms. My hosts will often tell me to relax and cross my legs since I’ll naturally plop down into seiza, the formal position with your legs tucked underneath yourself, tops of your feet stretched flat onto the mats. Without shifting or moving it can paralyze your legs, leaving you with a nasty case of pins and needles, but I find it’s the easiest way to go about it, all things being equal.
Tatami and pretty much all indoor flooring are a psychologically clean space, kids are free to roll around and grandma can conk out in front of the TV. Stepping outside the ground suddenly becomes dirty. With no lawn chairs or cushions on hand a plastic bag will come out to shield you from the grass. Construction workers on their coffee breaks squat low, knees bent and heads up, sipping can coffee and sharing cigarettes.
What with Tokyo’s infamously crowded trains, “train etiquette” is pursued rigorously, and the pleas to keep your bag on your lap and not sprawl around the seats are actually taken seriously here. Even during off peak hours it’s not unusual to see two young women at opposite ends of a deserted subway car, each sitting up straight as a ruler, bags neatly on their laps. I have been a little bit annoyed by a recent ad campaign by the Tokyo Metro system where characters from Sesame Street remind you to follow train manners (in Japanese and English.) I have a hard time believing Ernie really gives a shit if I fold my newspaper to create six inches more standing room.
Of course I’m generalizing here. These are rules of thumb, variations bouncing off of different ages and personalities. In the country they still take off their shoes before coming inside, but not everyone is so prissy about plopping down in a field for a snack. Teenagers sipping at rebellion will conspicuously sprawl their bodies around street vending machines and grubby subway platforms.
It’s tempting to draw big social theories out of these throwaway mannerisms, toss around big words and reduce everything to “culture”, that tired academic plow horse that has shouldered a good seventy years of half baked ideas. Which is why I would rather peek around an Akira Yamaguchi painting than read another “Chrysanthemum and the Sword”. There is one painting that constantly comes back to my mind that distills so many truths about how modern Japan thinks of itself. Titled “People Making Things” (2001), dozens of little figures are scrambling over the frames of a few inexplicable mechanical projects. Modern constructions workers and feudal laborers hoist up wooden poles, foremen sneer, engineers pore over electronic panels, wealthy financiers grin self contentedly and pat each other on the back. A man loosens his tie while walking into to an open air bar, salarymen and feudal laborers quaffing sake out of a large barrel. There is no apparent direction or purpose to the project. What are important are the social webs locked around the effort, the universal scowl of the supervisor, the ridiculous grin of a shirking worker. Yamaguchi just swims in these emotions and gestures, each emerging from their humble roles in this social matrix. It’s not what they’re doing that’s important; it’s how they do it.
One of my favorite modern Japanese artists is the painter and illustrator Akira Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi works in many styles, but his most well known works are his massive ink and oil paintings depicting fluid meshes of modern and feudal Japanese life in broad “Where’s Waldo?” style paintings. While at first glance identical to 17th and 18th century Japanese paintings where swathes of quickly detailed little figures were depicted parading around urban landscapes, with a closer look Yamaguchi has riddled his paintings with modern Japanese details, from electric water heaters tacked onto the sides of feudal houses to small congresses of armored samurai and suit-and-tyed businessmen. The one time-irrelevant aspect of Yamaguchi’s paintings are the postures and expressions of his little figures, which all seem so quintessentially Japanese. I occasionally have to swallow my astonishment and gulp when squinting at the details in his work – the slightly tilted head and closed eyes of a stoic looking fellow in a public bath is the distilled image of a guy I saw in the local hot springs last week: right down to the carefully folded square of a washcloth resting on his head. His paintings are a little bit overwhelming at times, crammed as they are with miniscule moments of Japanese life. His work has made him famous domestically; his fantasy illustrations of the Mitsukoshi department store were plastered on trains all over Tokyo last year as an ad for their 100th anniversary, and a recent book collection of his paintings has been prominently displayed in just about every bookstore I’ve walked into. Yamaguchi’s work has shaped my photographic expeditions around Tokyo, keeping my eye out for a flip of the wrist or a scratch of the neck that wanders from mother to son from playmate to playmate.
One of the first gestures I noticed is the way you shake hands here: stiffly, but with gusto, back arched slightly in the unconscious ghost of a bow. Though it still has faint foreign quotation marks around it, the handshake has become just another addition to the broad range of Japanese gestures.
Though probably a Chinese import, the domestic equivalent of the bow is probably the most well known gesture in the Japanese physical vocabulary. On a short trip to Taiwan last year I was surprised to note the radically different quality in bowing. It is used far less frequently and goes far less deep than Japanese bowing. I recall slow casual nods at the waist in tea-houses and restaurants which seemed worlds away from the clean and occasionally frantic twitching that goes on in Japan. There is a universe of bows and nods in Japan that exist purely in the kinesthetic memory, coming out of both conscious practice and unconscious absorption. On my walk home I frequently pass a neighborhood bar where the sliding glass walls have been opened up and tables spill out into the street. Men and women at the long tables squint, smile and nod their heads in a fashion that is universal but somehow coming out distinctly Japanese.
Certain forms of bowing are drilled into students from elementary school onwards, and sometimes earlier. It is quite an experience to introduce yourself before several hundred kindergarteners lined in exquisite rows in identical little jumpers, then to have them all bow to you in unison, collapsing into giggles afterwards. From there on bowing is worked into daily rituals. While practices vary depending on class and teachers, the more traditional start out with a barked “Kiritsu!” (Stand!), and “Rei!” (Bow!), where the entire class and the teacher will bow to one another, then begin the lesson. The practice continues up through adulthood, the beginning of just about any meeting consecrated with the entire room bowing in unison. Just about every store has a different bowing policy to its customers, from the faint nods and warm smiles from the corner produce store to the closed-eye, exquisitely angled tilts-from-the-waist at your finer restaurants.
There are of course certain gestures that are universal to the human animal, from the raising of eyebrows and contraction of cheek muscles that make up a welcoming smile to the closed hand which seems to indicate violence and strength across the board. But there are so many other twitches and flaps that are culturally specific, picked up and passed around like new words and phrases. It isn’t easy to master the subtly graded formalities of polite Japanese, but learning when and how to bow is something you pick up without thinking about. I’m pretty sure the waitstaff at US restaurants always give me a little more room as an involuntarily nod and twitch whenever they bring something to the table.
There are almost too many too list. (But hey, that’s why I’m writing this.) When heading the wrong way through a thick crowd you hold up your flat hand like a sharks fin cutting through the water. Some particularly enthusiastic old guys add a steady up-and-down chopping motion, as if cutting their way through a jungle. The hand gesture for “come here” isn’t the circular arm swing we use in the states, but kind of like a reverse of the “shoo!” gesture, hand flapping down from the wrist, pulling the person in. It is standard etiquette to hold up a flat open palm like a signal flag when you’re crossing the street. Embarrassment or shyness comes out both in a flushed face and a conspicuous scratching of the back of your neck. And while it’s a bit embarrassing to note this, schoolgirls and professional women in skirts often press their open hands to their mid thigh when walking up stairs, pressing the fabric against themselves to prevent any peeking from below. Not that I ever photographed that. The girls and the cops probably wouldn’t understand my purely anthropological interests in the subject.
Women tucking in their skirts walking up the stairs is as much a product of the physical reality of Tokyo as the cultural makeup of Japan, but there’s no real separating of the two. Short skirts and stairs in train stations are pretty common in Japan, and modesty is a natural human instinct: throw all three together and you get the cultural meme of hands tucking in skirts. These reactions to the manmade landscape are a whole subdivision of kinesthetics.
I’m always been interested in the variety of postures that emerge from sitting on flat tatami matting. While many Japanese homes feature a dinner table with chairs, venture out into the country and you’ll find homes where there isn’t a high backed chair in sight, the entire rhythm of the room lowered to the floor. With nothing to lean back on you tend to alternate between hunching forward and leaning back on your arms. My hosts will often tell me to relax and cross my legs since I’ll naturally plop down into seiza, the formal position with your legs tucked underneath yourself, tops of your feet stretched flat onto the mats. Without shifting or moving it can paralyze your legs, leaving you with a nasty case of pins and needles, but I find it’s the easiest way to go about it, all things being equal.
Tatami and pretty much all indoor flooring are a psychologically clean space, kids are free to roll around and grandma can conk out in front of the TV. Stepping outside the ground suddenly becomes dirty. With no lawn chairs or cushions on hand a plastic bag will come out to shield you from the grass. Construction workers on their coffee breaks squat low, knees bent and heads up, sipping can coffee and sharing cigarettes.
What with Tokyo’s infamously crowded trains, “train etiquette” is pursued rigorously, and the pleas to keep your bag on your lap and not sprawl around the seats are actually taken seriously here. Even during off peak hours it’s not unusual to see two young women at opposite ends of a deserted subway car, each sitting up straight as a ruler, bags neatly on their laps. I have been a little bit annoyed by a recent ad campaign by the Tokyo Metro system where characters from Sesame Street remind you to follow train manners (in Japanese and English.) I have a hard time believing Ernie really gives a shit if I fold my newspaper to create six inches more standing room.
Of course I’m generalizing here. These are rules of thumb, variations bouncing off of different ages and personalities. In the country they still take off their shoes before coming inside, but not everyone is so prissy about plopping down in a field for a snack. Teenagers sipping at rebellion will conspicuously sprawl their bodies around street vending machines and grubby subway platforms.
It’s tempting to draw big social theories out of these throwaway mannerisms, toss around big words and reduce everything to “culture”, that tired academic plow horse that has shouldered a good seventy years of half baked ideas. Which is why I would rather peek around an Akira Yamaguchi painting than read another “Chrysanthemum and the Sword”. There is one painting that constantly comes back to my mind that distills so many truths about how modern Japan thinks of itself. Titled “People Making Things” (2001), dozens of little figures are scrambling over the frames of a few inexplicable mechanical projects. Modern constructions workers and feudal laborers hoist up wooden poles, foremen sneer, engineers pore over electronic panels, wealthy financiers grin self contentedly and pat each other on the back. A man loosens his tie while walking into to an open air bar, salarymen and feudal laborers quaffing sake out of a large barrel. There is no apparent direction or purpose to the project. What are important are the social webs locked around the effort, the universal scowl of the supervisor, the ridiculous grin of a shirking worker. Yamaguchi just swims in these emotions and gestures, each emerging from their humble roles in this social matrix. It’s not what they’re doing that’s important; it’s how they do it.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
ghosts
The air at work is stale and lifeless, seared through the heaters or frost-burned through the air-conditioning. For weeks my boss insisted that opening the windows would let in clouds of exhaust, dust and car horns, but I’ve finally peeled off those excuses to her real answer: evil spirits. I had never noticed half dozen wards wrapped in thin white cloth and scotch-taped along the walls before that, they sat unobtrusively among the world maps and alphabet posters.
downstairs
The Indian restaurant on the first floor has been dark since last Tuesday. I thought they might be on vacation, but the sign says thank you for your business, we have closed. I can hear them in the apartment next door, the front door open, tugging to the end of the safety chain, thick smells of cooking and voices drifting out. I’ve been trying to guess out the emotional shape underneath the unfamiliar words, but they talk flatly and everyday to each other. I don’t know if they’ve failed or just reached the end of something. We haven’t seen each other in the hall.
The karaoke bar has moved their pamphlet racks and daily-special chalkboards out in front of the Indian restaurant. Someone has started parking a cherry red Akira style motorcycle across the front door.
Yesterday an older woman with tight skin and a painted face had set out racks of used clothes and little bins of old plastic toys in front of the empty Indian restaurant. Behind her little display the front door of the restaurant was open, inside it was piled high with chairs and table cloths. She smiled and told me to look around the stuff she was selling, but I didn’t have time to stop and ask what it was all about.
The karaoke bar has moved their pamphlet racks and daily-special chalkboards out in front of the Indian restaurant. Someone has started parking a cherry red Akira style motorcycle across the front door.
Yesterday an older woman with tight skin and a painted face had set out racks of used clothes and little bins of old plastic toys in front of the empty Indian restaurant. Behind her little display the front door of the restaurant was open, inside it was piled high with chairs and table cloths. She smiled and told me to look around the stuff she was selling, but I didn’t have time to stop and ask what it was all about.
crows
The crows know that burnable garbage goes out on Tuesdays and Fridays, they tear the bags apart for fish bones and pork gristle. Last Monday night after I’d piled my bag with the others the alley across the street, I squinted at the black shape dangling over the garbage heap. I breathed easy the next day: it wasn’t a real, it was an inflatable crow carcass. Same squishy plastic as a beach ball, even has one of those clear chewy nozzles that tucks inside.
Friday, June 17, 2005
urawa city blues
Ikebukuro has the largest retail space in a single building in all of Japan, but I would like to dispel any ideas of a cavern-like Wal-Mart planted in north-west Tokyo. Like so much retail in Japan, this is an outgrowth of the train station. Ikebukuro is sliced in half by it's gargantuan train station, which is still only the second largest in Tokyo. It is the meeting point for a tangle of national and private railways, the two most prominent being the Seibu and Tobu railways.
The ideographs that spell out Seibu and Tobu refer to east and west sections of Musashino, an old name for the large plain region that is now thick with humanity and concrete. The railways are rival feudal networks of department stores and trains to move people to the department stores. They are literally the product of a sibling rivalry, carving up Tokyo real estate in a business epic of Shakesperean size. The owners of the companies are half-brothers, their father making a fortune in the immediate aftermath of the war. For unclear reasons the legitimate son was disinherited from his father's fortune, and the illegitimate son was given control of the Tobu empire. Left with his breeding and business connections the legitimate son founded Seibu, creating a network of train lines that webs across northwest Tokyo into Saitama. Seibu had the largest deparment store in Japan for years until Tobu built an annex to their Ikebukuro branch to surpass it. These twin giants perch on either end of Ikebukuro station only a few hudnred yards from each other. In their competition to stay ahead of one another the buildings are crammed with retail stores crammed with just about every product under the sun.
It seemed like a good place to look for tortillas.
I had just finished paying for two plastic wrapped packs of tortillas and a pound of kidney beans when my cell phone began to chime with the melody of the emerging spirits from "Spirited Away." The Seibu food section was exploding with after-work shoppers and blue print uniformed employees hawking French wines, pickled eggplants and grilled eel. I while scurrying with my groceries, looking for a quiet corner in the middle of this riot.
"It's about your working visa Jamie!" the voice on the other end was struggling to get to me amid the row of butchers screaming the quality of their pork cuts.
I found a staircase where my cellphone hovered between one and two bars. "My visa?" I cradled the tortillas.
It was my boss, calling about my visa renewal. "It's not as simple as I thought. You see, the law has changed..."
When I first entered Japan I was given a three year working visa with "instructor" status. Everyone who has employed me in Japan, from the lanky American owner of the vegetarian restaurant to the central Tokyo tour guide company, understood the old law. A visa's a visa, I'm free to gut fish in Hokkaido or edit textbooks in Osaka. But at some point when no one was paying attention the categories got shifted and suddenly an instructor visa was just that: I could teach in schools, but only public schools.
I've been blissfully working here illegally for two years and now I have to write it all out for the immigration officer in a neat little form, with a little letter saying, "gee, sorry, won't happen again."
I had dreams last night tangled with large dark cities and creatures of science fiction. Before I woke up I was riding in an elevator with two men, and one calmly turned to the other, opened a mouth the size of a basketball, and sunk his teeth into the other's man's neck, right where it meets the shoulder.
After I got the call I had to get home to cook the beans and throw together some guacamole and salsa. I had twelve dinner guests coming over, and I was supposed to have appetizers ready by six. We were cramming into my studio apartment, which is roughly the size of a humvee. Hiro was making sukiyaki for our main dish: pots of vegetables and beef bubbling away in a sweetened broth. Kayo had worked for a few years in a bakery and was bringing cakes and puddings. Takeo and Michi were bringing a bottle of a thick Mexican liquour. Everyone else brought chips or beers or a few dollars and a grin.
We tucked into my place tight but comfortable, thirteen of us tucked around two tables scrambled with a dozen plates, two pots of sukiyaki, a tray of fresh sauces, kidney beans cooked in rum, a plate of warmed tortillas, and a rainbow of drinks. Takeo played bartender in the corner, his day off starting to look a lot like the nights at his bar. Hiro and I cut each other up in our mock Iron Chef competition. He kicked my ass, but I wowed on exoticism: no one had ever had proper burritos or fresh salsa before.
When it got dark and stuffy in my place we went out to the roof with folding chairs and jugs of wine. We took photos against the spread of Urawa. Carlo Rossi is also the cheapest wine in Japan, and I showed them how to hook it in your thumb and drink it from over your shoulder, just like I learned in that dorm room freshman year.
Hiro was lying down apart from the group, his face pale. "You alright?" I asked.
"Think I just ate to much. but thanks for those... burritos? They were great." He smiled wanly. "You know I don't drink much, those two kinda ruffled me up to. Be alright in a little while."
"Actually," I said, looking over my shoulder as Kayo trying to get everybody to dance against the chilly night air. "I have this problem with my visa. I think it'll be okay, but... I might have to leave in six weeks." I explained the details.
"You're kidding! Do you think it'll work out?"
"I dunno, I have no idea how strict it is."
"But you'll be able to work it out somehow right?"
"Think so." No one had budged from their chairs behind us so Kayo was dancing by herself in the circle of chairs, her face poised in faux contentment, studiously ignoring the wine drinkers who refused to get up. "You wanna be alone, for a bit, right, get over all that food?"
He nodded, and I went back to this circle of folks, none of whom I'd known longer than six months, the fixtures of my life here. I had wandered years in Japan to finally find myself with a circle of friends who seemed barely aware I was an American, who had taken me plainly as I was, never uttered a false praise of my Japanese or plied me for free English lessons, never asked me silly questions about my ability to eat raw fish or if rice exists in America. Just a group of folks I could share a beer with, get together a Sunday afternoon soccer game.
Felt like they were already all just a snapshots, laughing and gummy bodies stiffened to thin, frozen faces on a photograph.
The ideographs that spell out Seibu and Tobu refer to east and west sections of Musashino, an old name for the large plain region that is now thick with humanity and concrete. The railways are rival feudal networks of department stores and trains to move people to the department stores. They are literally the product of a sibling rivalry, carving up Tokyo real estate in a business epic of Shakesperean size. The owners of the companies are half-brothers, their father making a fortune in the immediate aftermath of the war. For unclear reasons the legitimate son was disinherited from his father's fortune, and the illegitimate son was given control of the Tobu empire. Left with his breeding and business connections the legitimate son founded Seibu, creating a network of train lines that webs across northwest Tokyo into Saitama. Seibu had the largest deparment store in Japan for years until Tobu built an annex to their Ikebukuro branch to surpass it. These twin giants perch on either end of Ikebukuro station only a few hudnred yards from each other. In their competition to stay ahead of one another the buildings are crammed with retail stores crammed with just about every product under the sun.
It seemed like a good place to look for tortillas.
I had just finished paying for two plastic wrapped packs of tortillas and a pound of kidney beans when my cell phone began to chime with the melody of the emerging spirits from "Spirited Away." The Seibu food section was exploding with after-work shoppers and blue print uniformed employees hawking French wines, pickled eggplants and grilled eel. I while scurrying with my groceries, looking for a quiet corner in the middle of this riot.
"It's about your working visa Jamie!" the voice on the other end was struggling to get to me amid the row of butchers screaming the quality of their pork cuts.
I found a staircase where my cellphone hovered between one and two bars. "My visa?" I cradled the tortillas.
It was my boss, calling about my visa renewal. "It's not as simple as I thought. You see, the law has changed..."
When I first entered Japan I was given a three year working visa with "instructor" status. Everyone who has employed me in Japan, from the lanky American owner of the vegetarian restaurant to the central Tokyo tour guide company, understood the old law. A visa's a visa, I'm free to gut fish in Hokkaido or edit textbooks in Osaka. But at some point when no one was paying attention the categories got shifted and suddenly an instructor visa was just that: I could teach in schools, but only public schools.
I've been blissfully working here illegally for two years and now I have to write it all out for the immigration officer in a neat little form, with a little letter saying, "gee, sorry, won't happen again."
I had dreams last night tangled with large dark cities and creatures of science fiction. Before I woke up I was riding in an elevator with two men, and one calmly turned to the other, opened a mouth the size of a basketball, and sunk his teeth into the other's man's neck, right where it meets the shoulder.
After I got the call I had to get home to cook the beans and throw together some guacamole and salsa. I had twelve dinner guests coming over, and I was supposed to have appetizers ready by six. We were cramming into my studio apartment, which is roughly the size of a humvee. Hiro was making sukiyaki for our main dish: pots of vegetables and beef bubbling away in a sweetened broth. Kayo had worked for a few years in a bakery and was bringing cakes and puddings. Takeo and Michi were bringing a bottle of a thick Mexican liquour. Everyone else brought chips or beers or a few dollars and a grin.
We tucked into my place tight but comfortable, thirteen of us tucked around two tables scrambled with a dozen plates, two pots of sukiyaki, a tray of fresh sauces, kidney beans cooked in rum, a plate of warmed tortillas, and a rainbow of drinks. Takeo played bartender in the corner, his day off starting to look a lot like the nights at his bar. Hiro and I cut each other up in our mock Iron Chef competition. He kicked my ass, but I wowed on exoticism: no one had ever had proper burritos or fresh salsa before.
When it got dark and stuffy in my place we went out to the roof with folding chairs and jugs of wine. We took photos against the spread of Urawa. Carlo Rossi is also the cheapest wine in Japan, and I showed them how to hook it in your thumb and drink it from over your shoulder, just like I learned in that dorm room freshman year.
Hiro was lying down apart from the group, his face pale. "You alright?" I asked.
"Think I just ate to much. but thanks for those... burritos? They were great." He smiled wanly. "You know I don't drink much, those two kinda ruffled me up to. Be alright in a little while."
"Actually," I said, looking over my shoulder as Kayo trying to get everybody to dance against the chilly night air. "I have this problem with my visa. I think it'll be okay, but... I might have to leave in six weeks." I explained the details.
"You're kidding! Do you think it'll work out?"
"I dunno, I have no idea how strict it is."
"But you'll be able to work it out somehow right?"
"Think so." No one had budged from their chairs behind us so Kayo was dancing by herself in the circle of chairs, her face poised in faux contentment, studiously ignoring the wine drinkers who refused to get up. "You wanna be alone, for a bit, right, get over all that food?"
He nodded, and I went back to this circle of folks, none of whom I'd known longer than six months, the fixtures of my life here. I had wandered years in Japan to finally find myself with a circle of friends who seemed barely aware I was an American, who had taken me plainly as I was, never uttered a false praise of my Japanese or plied me for free English lessons, never asked me silly questions about my ability to eat raw fish or if rice exists in America. Just a group of folks I could share a beer with, get together a Sunday afternoon soccer game.
Felt like they were already all just a snapshots, laughing and gummy bodies stiffened to thin, frozen faces on a photograph.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
our mamori-gami
We left as the sun was just beginning to seep into the sky. The morning was holding its breath and the air was steely and cool. The lead van was loaded with mikes, mixers, two MC’s, a DJ, and enough alcohol to kill a horse. Our van was an identical white, a kaiseki chef at the wheel, smoking an American cigarette, a DJ stuffed between stacks of plastic ice coolers in the back seat, checking beats on his laptop, and me sitting shotgun, watching the sunrise in the rearview mirror. The stereo played Wayne Shorter as we ragged on Hiro for his grandma driving and made fun of each others haircuts. Me and the Japanese hip-hop group, going camping.
A few months ago Takeo handed me a small hand lettered flyer printed on shock blue paper. I turned it around in my hands as Takeo finished the head on my beer, taking my 500 yen coin off the table with a nod. “We’re doing this free outdoor music festival on Sunday the twenty-second. You should come.” Takeo has a flat broad face and two thick eyebrows that live permanently under a grey baseball cap. His eyes turn down to the floor whenever he smiles. I’m one of the few people who call him by his given name and not by his informal title, masta. He doesn’t seek out the title, but society lays it on his gentle forehead. He is almost perfectly balanced against his wife Michi, tiny and wonderful, pinched eyes and a face glowing beneath a massive pile of dreadlocks. I get the feeling that in her practical and modest manner Michi gathers all the ideas half baked at the bar and prods them to crisp and steaming reality. A small bar like theirs normally swirls around the strong and spiky personality of the owner: masta for men, mama-san for women. But this gentle couple with their love of American folk music have let the customers define the place, giving space to hip-hop bands, trance DJ’s, rockabilly fanatics and old school punk rockers. They have quietly woven together a network of regulars, always flexible enough for a few more, but tight enough for everyone to go camping for the weekend.
We arrived around eight fifteen, steep grassy slopes hitting an unnaturally flat field that pooled out below a small covered concrete stage. It was about as long as a Greyhound bus and as tall as the pine trees around us. Large panels of styrofoam had been painted in colored stripes and fashioned into a rainbow arc over the front of the stage. Chunks of people were eating breakfast with soundcheck: rice balls, canned beer and dried fish snacks. Michi was unpacking boxes of handmade clothes and store bought liquor onto rows of folding tables and Takeo was shouldering loops of cables and hammering together a wooden tent frame for the sound board. After we had helped the band unload their records and DJ equipment, Hiro and I unpacked the folding tables, camping chairs and ice coolers. Old women from down the road came to stare with furrowed brows at the clumps of hippies and sound equipment.
People were starting to trickle in, stumbling down the grassy slopes in fours and sixes, dotting the field with tarps and coolers of beer. It was a cool and cloudy Sunday morning, some of us basking in the last day of the weekend, some people clutching to this day off they had bargained for weeks before, trading shifts or begging long promised holidays. With no announcement, music came pounding across the field, a troupe of young Japanese hippies pounding on drums they had carved themselves, their leader waving changes and chants with flashes of hair and an intense smile. Two or three young looking guys with cameras the size of small rocket launchers took up tactical positions around the band, twisting torsos to sniper their photos.
As the morning wore on drums gave way to DJ’s spinning soul music. I helped Hiro make a salad of mashed yams and julienned daikon. As I mushed the yams with oil and veggies his gnarly hands twirled a knife around the daikon; it was soon laying in three clean piles of matchsticks. My friends’ hip hop group took the stage to scattered applause and tentative glances from the tie-dyed and ponytailed crowd. They bounced through their set juggling around sound problems. The sound guy crawled between keyboards and turntables to realign cords and place power strips while the two MC’s tossed the one good mike back and forth. If it fizzled the sound guy’s hand would pop out from underneath a mixing board, a new mike just plugged in, the set a high wire act at the mercy of the sound system. The crowd gradually thinned back to their tarps and cold beer, and the group left the stage to scattered applause from the few dancers left. Hiro and I consoled them with the salad and a round of beers from the cooler.
The clouds burned away and suddenly we were all very hot, sharing beers with friends who dropped by our tarps, munching on peanuts and dried squid and making fun of each other’s haircuts. The afternoon grew hazy in the heat and the beer, bodies napping in the shade, wild frisbees and stray soccer balls colliding with plastic cups and heads. I strolled around crunching on rice crackers talking to old friends and new, asking after those who couldn’t make it and those who would be here soon.
Asking one pale American where he was coming from, I almost dropped the last few swallows in my cup when he mentioned Hachinohei, a city on the very northern tip of Honshu, a full day’s drive from here. He had come down with a bunch of regulars from his local bar, and waved over his masta to talk to us. The masta looked like the veteran of a million summer festivals, skin dark with sun, voice deep and raspy, rangy arms twisted in tattoos, a bright and easy smile across his aging face. “Hey, please call me Kappa,” he said, switching our handshake to an affirmative handlock.
I did drop my beer at that one. A kappa are ancient Japanese water spirits, frog-men with duck billed mouths and fishing spears that stand as high as your chest. Mischevious or helpful, they can bring you fortune or steal your newborn children. You don’t pee in a kappa’s river. When I asked him about it he shrugged. “Yeah man, I’m kappa. Ever since I was seven, people call me Kappa, y’know.” He had left his duck bill and spear at home, but he told me that he had just bought 1500 tsubo (…) of open land in Aomori. “And hey man,” he said, eyes crinkled and twinkling “there’s a river in it too.”
A girl whose words were dripping with Aomori dialect offered us a few bowls of the soup that had been bubbling in the shade. We toasted the afternoon together and I thanked her for the soup. She told me it was a Hachinohei specialty, the hard local rice crackers cooked with seasonable veggies in a thick pork broth. As we sat down in the shade Kappa continued his story, stopping occasionally to slurp from a paper bowl or a beer can.
For a Japanese water spirit he was pretty well traveled, having back-packed in great circles through the jungles and beach raves of South-East Asia, along the mountains of Central America and across the African savanna. “But you know man?” he paused to put the final lick on a hand rolled cigarette. “Aomori is pretty great. You can wander out into the forest and find weed growing wild! Just fields of it! They used to be taller than me, but the cops they burned all the big ones. But you can still find ‘em man.” Asking what he did now, he told me about settling down as the owner-chef of a restaurant-bar in his native Hachinohei, the American interrupting to say how good the food was. He had met Takeo at a music festival a few years ago, and when he heard about this event he had corralled as many regulars as he could into a caravan of trucks and four-doors and brought everyone down for the weekend. “So here we are man! Have a beer!” A friend called him away and the American and I sat talking about Japan and bars. “Yeah man, I wouldn’t know anyone up there without Kappa y’know? That guy’s great. So where’s your masta? Y’know, the guy who organized this.”
In that moment I felt several stray thoughts in my brain click together into a perfect circle. Mama and Masta always seemed like thoroughly Japanese jokes, names of respect given a sly ironic twist, borrowed as they are from a foreign language. They were born somewhere in the rows of tiny drinking spots where a wiry man with a towel snapped in a band around his head sweats over rows of slowly grilled yakitori skewers, scraping a living selling beer and conversation to a counter of salaried workers who make four of five times what he does. From five PM until closing he is the masta of his small corner of the world, but what is he Tuesday morning at the bank, begging an extension on his loan payments? But could I be wrong? Maybe they are our mothers and masters more than we suspect, benevolently ruling our selves after work.
The sky grew thick and wooly gray as the last band took the stage, but with my mind spotted with beer, sunlight and fuzzy epiphanies my memory of them is a blurry mess. I remember Hiro talking about how to make good sauces for grilled beef while simultaneously realizing the folk-rock song they were playing had been a favorite of this old Boston street musician friend of mine. Just as the band rounded out their last guitar solo the sky began to drip and we hastily folded chairs and wrapped up tarps, scurrying up to our rented cabin for the night.
After waving off friends departing in cars and shuttle buses we settled to grilling beef and veggies on the cast iron grill on the porch of our cabin, sending plates over to the folks in the next cabin over and making fun of each others haircuts. Outside the circle of our porch light the world was black and silent as stage curtains, our bad jokes and skittery laughter disappearing in the darkness. After we had grilled off the last of the veggies and the yakisoba I said my goodnights and turned in early, arms stinging red from the sun and head feeling like the last plate of yakisoba on the grill.
We had breakfast with the festival staff and Kappa’s caravan from Aomori, big pots of miso soup, plates of grilled vegetables and free beers poured from the leftover kegs. I had two bowls of soup, slices of grilled burdock and eggplant some ginger pickles and half a cup of the beer. Some of our group had work that afternoon so we ate our fill and thanked Michi and Takeo for the breakfast. “By the way,” he said quietly, “have you guys seen the festival’s mamori-gami yet? It’s just a few minutes drive from here, I have to go that way anyhow, so I can show you the road.” We wound up a single lane strip of concrete that curved through pine forests and along sheer valleys, eventually parking at a turn in the road. Takeo led us up a dark little path between the trees, then stopped short. “This is it, the protective spirit of our music festival.”
I didn’t even notice it at first, the twisting coils flooding my whole field of vision. A massive tree, more than a thousand years old, mammoth twisting branch-trunks hurling out of the earth like the tentacles of a sea monster, frozen in a single instant. Our heads spun in different directions to try and judge the scope of it. Takeo placed his hand on a gnarly knot at the base of the tree the size of a bicycle wheel. It looked like the face of an elephant emerging from the trunk, folded with age. Takeo put his hands together and thanked it for another prosperous year, and as he stepped back a wave of laughter suddenly possessed us all at the same time. We bawled with open eyes and beaming faces, face-to-face with our master, this god of the old world who had quietly guided our little human gatherings and our drunken laughter: a party of fools at the feet of eternity.
A few months ago Takeo handed me a small hand lettered flyer printed on shock blue paper. I turned it around in my hands as Takeo finished the head on my beer, taking my 500 yen coin off the table with a nod. “We’re doing this free outdoor music festival on Sunday the twenty-second. You should come.” Takeo has a flat broad face and two thick eyebrows that live permanently under a grey baseball cap. His eyes turn down to the floor whenever he smiles. I’m one of the few people who call him by his given name and not by his informal title, masta. He doesn’t seek out the title, but society lays it on his gentle forehead. He is almost perfectly balanced against his wife Michi, tiny and wonderful, pinched eyes and a face glowing beneath a massive pile of dreadlocks. I get the feeling that in her practical and modest manner Michi gathers all the ideas half baked at the bar and prods them to crisp and steaming reality. A small bar like theirs normally swirls around the strong and spiky personality of the owner: masta for men, mama-san for women. But this gentle couple with their love of American folk music have let the customers define the place, giving space to hip-hop bands, trance DJ’s, rockabilly fanatics and old school punk rockers. They have quietly woven together a network of regulars, always flexible enough for a few more, but tight enough for everyone to go camping for the weekend.
We arrived around eight fifteen, steep grassy slopes hitting an unnaturally flat field that pooled out below a small covered concrete stage. It was about as long as a Greyhound bus and as tall as the pine trees around us. Large panels of styrofoam had been painted in colored stripes and fashioned into a rainbow arc over the front of the stage. Chunks of people were eating breakfast with soundcheck: rice balls, canned beer and dried fish snacks. Michi was unpacking boxes of handmade clothes and store bought liquor onto rows of folding tables and Takeo was shouldering loops of cables and hammering together a wooden tent frame for the sound board. After we had helped the band unload their records and DJ equipment, Hiro and I unpacked the folding tables, camping chairs and ice coolers. Old women from down the road came to stare with furrowed brows at the clumps of hippies and sound equipment.
People were starting to trickle in, stumbling down the grassy slopes in fours and sixes, dotting the field with tarps and coolers of beer. It was a cool and cloudy Sunday morning, some of us basking in the last day of the weekend, some people clutching to this day off they had bargained for weeks before, trading shifts or begging long promised holidays. With no announcement, music came pounding across the field, a troupe of young Japanese hippies pounding on drums they had carved themselves, their leader waving changes and chants with flashes of hair and an intense smile. Two or three young looking guys with cameras the size of small rocket launchers took up tactical positions around the band, twisting torsos to sniper their photos.
As the morning wore on drums gave way to DJ’s spinning soul music. I helped Hiro make a salad of mashed yams and julienned daikon. As I mushed the yams with oil and veggies his gnarly hands twirled a knife around the daikon; it was soon laying in three clean piles of matchsticks. My friends’ hip hop group took the stage to scattered applause and tentative glances from the tie-dyed and ponytailed crowd. They bounced through their set juggling around sound problems. The sound guy crawled between keyboards and turntables to realign cords and place power strips while the two MC’s tossed the one good mike back and forth. If it fizzled the sound guy’s hand would pop out from underneath a mixing board, a new mike just plugged in, the set a high wire act at the mercy of the sound system. The crowd gradually thinned back to their tarps and cold beer, and the group left the stage to scattered applause from the few dancers left. Hiro and I consoled them with the salad and a round of beers from the cooler.
The clouds burned away and suddenly we were all very hot, sharing beers with friends who dropped by our tarps, munching on peanuts and dried squid and making fun of each other’s haircuts. The afternoon grew hazy in the heat and the beer, bodies napping in the shade, wild frisbees and stray soccer balls colliding with plastic cups and heads. I strolled around crunching on rice crackers talking to old friends and new, asking after those who couldn’t make it and those who would be here soon.
Asking one pale American where he was coming from, I almost dropped the last few swallows in my cup when he mentioned Hachinohei, a city on the very northern tip of Honshu, a full day’s drive from here. He had come down with a bunch of regulars from his local bar, and waved over his masta to talk to us. The masta looked like the veteran of a million summer festivals, skin dark with sun, voice deep and raspy, rangy arms twisted in tattoos, a bright and easy smile across his aging face. “Hey, please call me Kappa,” he said, switching our handshake to an affirmative handlock.
I did drop my beer at that one. A kappa are ancient Japanese water spirits, frog-men with duck billed mouths and fishing spears that stand as high as your chest. Mischevious or helpful, they can bring you fortune or steal your newborn children. You don’t pee in a kappa’s river. When I asked him about it he shrugged. “Yeah man, I’m kappa. Ever since I was seven, people call me Kappa, y’know.” He had left his duck bill and spear at home, but he told me that he had just bought 1500 tsubo (…) of open land in Aomori. “And hey man,” he said, eyes crinkled and twinkling “there’s a river in it too.”
A girl whose words were dripping with Aomori dialect offered us a few bowls of the soup that had been bubbling in the shade. We toasted the afternoon together and I thanked her for the soup. She told me it was a Hachinohei specialty, the hard local rice crackers cooked with seasonable veggies in a thick pork broth. As we sat down in the shade Kappa continued his story, stopping occasionally to slurp from a paper bowl or a beer can.
For a Japanese water spirit he was pretty well traveled, having back-packed in great circles through the jungles and beach raves of South-East Asia, along the mountains of Central America and across the African savanna. “But you know man?” he paused to put the final lick on a hand rolled cigarette. “Aomori is pretty great. You can wander out into the forest and find weed growing wild! Just fields of it! They used to be taller than me, but the cops they burned all the big ones. But you can still find ‘em man.” Asking what he did now, he told me about settling down as the owner-chef of a restaurant-bar in his native Hachinohei, the American interrupting to say how good the food was. He had met Takeo at a music festival a few years ago, and when he heard about this event he had corralled as many regulars as he could into a caravan of trucks and four-doors and brought everyone down for the weekend. “So here we are man! Have a beer!” A friend called him away and the American and I sat talking about Japan and bars. “Yeah man, I wouldn’t know anyone up there without Kappa y’know? That guy’s great. So where’s your masta? Y’know, the guy who organized this.”
In that moment I felt several stray thoughts in my brain click together into a perfect circle. Mama and Masta always seemed like thoroughly Japanese jokes, names of respect given a sly ironic twist, borrowed as they are from a foreign language. They were born somewhere in the rows of tiny drinking spots where a wiry man with a towel snapped in a band around his head sweats over rows of slowly grilled yakitori skewers, scraping a living selling beer and conversation to a counter of salaried workers who make four of five times what he does. From five PM until closing he is the masta of his small corner of the world, but what is he Tuesday morning at the bank, begging an extension on his loan payments? But could I be wrong? Maybe they are our mothers and masters more than we suspect, benevolently ruling our selves after work.
The sky grew thick and wooly gray as the last band took the stage, but with my mind spotted with beer, sunlight and fuzzy epiphanies my memory of them is a blurry mess. I remember Hiro talking about how to make good sauces for grilled beef while simultaneously realizing the folk-rock song they were playing had been a favorite of this old Boston street musician friend of mine. Just as the band rounded out their last guitar solo the sky began to drip and we hastily folded chairs and wrapped up tarps, scurrying up to our rented cabin for the night.
After waving off friends departing in cars and shuttle buses we settled to grilling beef and veggies on the cast iron grill on the porch of our cabin, sending plates over to the folks in the next cabin over and making fun of each others haircuts. Outside the circle of our porch light the world was black and silent as stage curtains, our bad jokes and skittery laughter disappearing in the darkness. After we had grilled off the last of the veggies and the yakisoba I said my goodnights and turned in early, arms stinging red from the sun and head feeling like the last plate of yakisoba on the grill.
We had breakfast with the festival staff and Kappa’s caravan from Aomori, big pots of miso soup, plates of grilled vegetables and free beers poured from the leftover kegs. I had two bowls of soup, slices of grilled burdock and eggplant some ginger pickles and half a cup of the beer. Some of our group had work that afternoon so we ate our fill and thanked Michi and Takeo for the breakfast. “By the way,” he said quietly, “have you guys seen the festival’s mamori-gami yet? It’s just a few minutes drive from here, I have to go that way anyhow, so I can show you the road.” We wound up a single lane strip of concrete that curved through pine forests and along sheer valleys, eventually parking at a turn in the road. Takeo led us up a dark little path between the trees, then stopped short. “This is it, the protective spirit of our music festival.”
I didn’t even notice it at first, the twisting coils flooding my whole field of vision. A massive tree, more than a thousand years old, mammoth twisting branch-trunks hurling out of the earth like the tentacles of a sea monster, frozen in a single instant. Our heads spun in different directions to try and judge the scope of it. Takeo placed his hand on a gnarly knot at the base of the tree the size of a bicycle wheel. It looked like the face of an elephant emerging from the trunk, folded with age. Takeo put his hands together and thanked it for another prosperous year, and as he stepped back a wave of laughter suddenly possessed us all at the same time. We bawled with open eyes and beaming faces, face-to-face with our master, this god of the old world who had quietly guided our little human gatherings and our drunken laughter: a party of fools at the feet of eternity.
Friday, May 20, 2005
vision examination
Accosting people on the street is pretty much a standard business practice in Japan. The convenience of my living close to a rail station is offset by the fact that a walk around my neighborhood entails brushing off half a dozen folks flyering shoppers with little packets of tissues, ads tucked inside. If business is slow, just about every bar, real estate agency, hostess club and slot machine parlor will send out the lowest grunt in the pecking order to confront pedestrians directly, proffering tissues or coupons to every passerby with a monotone “Please favor our business!”, head tilting up and down like a bobble doll. On the upside I have yet to pay for toilet paper or tissues: a stack of brightly colored tissue packets shining in M&M colors perches on my toilet tank.
Loping around as a white guy changes the reaction a bit: the hostess club girls in butt hugging skirts offer their tissues and smiles to everyone else, but for some reason the contact people zero in on you with a jittery smile and a “very cheap contacto.” The one time I actually bothered to take a coupon, I realized they weren’t kidding about the prices. So today I walked down to Apple Contacts, coupon sheepishly in hand, to buy a few months worth of very cheap contacto.
The store was on the third floor of a “mixed use” building, the first two used by a financing company, the fourth by an English school and the rest apartments nestled onto a few floors. After a filling out a short form I sat down on the available sofas, passing over the sports and women’s health magazines for a viciously drawn samurai comic. It was the twentieth issue in a series about the life of legendary swordsman Musashi Miyamoto, opening at the end of a duel, opponent already skewered on his sword. Miyamoto pulls it out, blood bursts in a beautiful arc, there are a few moments where they lock eyes and a strange kind of sympathy passes between them. I put the comic down and glanced around the room, from the other waiting customers absorbed in a daytime drama (“I will never tell father that you’re still alive, NEVER!”), to the staff behind the counter. It slowly dawned on me that every last person working in this place was a stunningly good looking woman between the age of twenty-three and twenty-nine, all of them decked in identically pressed cream-white and clam-pink uniforms.
Just as I swallowed that thought I heard my name called in a clear, cool voice. I was led into the next room, mirrors and stools lining the walls. This hologram of a girl led me to a device in the middle of the room where I rested my chin. In front of my eyes was an almost Platonic landscape, a gray road shooting straight through a lime green field to a tree draped in foliage. It blurred in and out, eventually resting onto a sharp definition. Before I had time to think about it any longer we were onto the next station. “Are they all automatic like that?” I asked her, half elated by the experience and half missing all my squinting at letter charts picking E’s from F’s. “No, just that one,” she said, her smile blinding me for a few seconds. After I had blinked it all away I found myself confronting rows of black Japanese characters floating in white space, watching them grow smaller and smaller until I could barely guess at their shape. If it’s possible to fail an eye exam I could probably do it on sheer nerves.
The vision then sat me down before a mirror with a pair of trial contacts. After tucking them in I threw my clear new vision around the room, along rows of mirrors and eye tests to the beaming face of the hologram girl, looking all the more unreal in this new high definition. Just as I was recovering from the gleam of her teeth she plonked me down on yet another sofa, slipping the results of my test through a narrow slot in the wall. An anonymous hand took the sheet soundlessly, and after a minute or two of flexing my new contacts around the room my name rang out and the hologram was motioning for me to walk through the curtain.
The room was lit dim as a whisper, a little control center set dead between the reception room and the examination room. I felt like I’d walked in on OZ himself, muttering an automatic “Excuse me…” before I could even see. Oz sat behind a low desk, lab coat turned silvery in the darkness. Before my pupils had a chance to fully relax they were probed with flashlights, look up, look down, OK, looking good. My eyes fluttered with stars and I was waved out in just two minutes, back to the lights of the waiting room and my samurai comic. I hadn’t even glimpsed his face.
I sat in the waiting room, watching the hologrammed uniforms float behind the desk and waiting for my order to be processed. I was unnerved by all of them, feeling odd at the women scurrying, smiling, not handling anything more complicated than an automated eye check machine, and that darkened little room at the center of it all. What niggled me was how calm and simple this had all been, how I enjoyed the smooth warm faces with their pixellated tinge, how I had even enjoyed the shadow in his office, and I enjoyed the hyper-reality of this cream colored waiting room. It was all as clean as a Hollywood film, polished to a digital sheen. In this office selling sight the waiting room was bustling with female visions, clean and anonymous. And the doctor was literally invisible.
Maybe some of these women had once held vague dreams of medicine, those wisps of ambition cutting off here: a smile behind a desk job and a paycheck they can keep as long as their skin stays smooth. Maybe they only dream of working until they marry a nice man with a fine job: a doctor. But who can say what they really wanted all along? Our desires and sense of the possible only stretch as far as we can see.
I heard my name called, the syllables blocky in Japanese syllables, and picked up my contacts, bagged and taped in blue plastic by the woman behind the desk. It was probably my new contacts, but I could have sworn she flickered in a digital blip as she smiled and thanked me. As I turned to leave I nearly ran into a guy about my age slouching out from the bathroom, skin tanned nut brown, hair permed and spiky, a red coat emblazoned with the store logo barely holding his rangy and jumpy body. He gave the desk girl a sly smile, swooped up a new basket of promotional tissues and turned down the hall in one fluid motion. He held the door for me and we walked out together into the clattering street coughing with heat and people.
Loping around as a white guy changes the reaction a bit: the hostess club girls in butt hugging skirts offer their tissues and smiles to everyone else, but for some reason the contact people zero in on you with a jittery smile and a “very cheap contacto.” The one time I actually bothered to take a coupon, I realized they weren’t kidding about the prices. So today I walked down to Apple Contacts, coupon sheepishly in hand, to buy a few months worth of very cheap contacto.
The store was on the third floor of a “mixed use” building, the first two used by a financing company, the fourth by an English school and the rest apartments nestled onto a few floors. After a filling out a short form I sat down on the available sofas, passing over the sports and women’s health magazines for a viciously drawn samurai comic. It was the twentieth issue in a series about the life of legendary swordsman Musashi Miyamoto, opening at the end of a duel, opponent already skewered on his sword. Miyamoto pulls it out, blood bursts in a beautiful arc, there are a few moments where they lock eyes and a strange kind of sympathy passes between them. I put the comic down and glanced around the room, from the other waiting customers absorbed in a daytime drama (“I will never tell father that you’re still alive, NEVER!”), to the staff behind the counter. It slowly dawned on me that every last person working in this place was a stunningly good looking woman between the age of twenty-three and twenty-nine, all of them decked in identically pressed cream-white and clam-pink uniforms.
Just as I swallowed that thought I heard my name called in a clear, cool voice. I was led into the next room, mirrors and stools lining the walls. This hologram of a girl led me to a device in the middle of the room where I rested my chin. In front of my eyes was an almost Platonic landscape, a gray road shooting straight through a lime green field to a tree draped in foliage. It blurred in and out, eventually resting onto a sharp definition. Before I had time to think about it any longer we were onto the next station. “Are they all automatic like that?” I asked her, half elated by the experience and half missing all my squinting at letter charts picking E’s from F’s. “No, just that one,” she said, her smile blinding me for a few seconds. After I had blinked it all away I found myself confronting rows of black Japanese characters floating in white space, watching them grow smaller and smaller until I could barely guess at their shape. If it’s possible to fail an eye exam I could probably do it on sheer nerves.
The vision then sat me down before a mirror with a pair of trial contacts. After tucking them in I threw my clear new vision around the room, along rows of mirrors and eye tests to the beaming face of the hologram girl, looking all the more unreal in this new high definition. Just as I was recovering from the gleam of her teeth she plonked me down on yet another sofa, slipping the results of my test through a narrow slot in the wall. An anonymous hand took the sheet soundlessly, and after a minute or two of flexing my new contacts around the room my name rang out and the hologram was motioning for me to walk through the curtain.
The room was lit dim as a whisper, a little control center set dead between the reception room and the examination room. I felt like I’d walked in on OZ himself, muttering an automatic “Excuse me…” before I could even see. Oz sat behind a low desk, lab coat turned silvery in the darkness. Before my pupils had a chance to fully relax they were probed with flashlights, look up, look down, OK, looking good. My eyes fluttered with stars and I was waved out in just two minutes, back to the lights of the waiting room and my samurai comic. I hadn’t even glimpsed his face.
I sat in the waiting room, watching the hologrammed uniforms float behind the desk and waiting for my order to be processed. I was unnerved by all of them, feeling odd at the women scurrying, smiling, not handling anything more complicated than an automated eye check machine, and that darkened little room at the center of it all. What niggled me was how calm and simple this had all been, how I enjoyed the smooth warm faces with their pixellated tinge, how I had even enjoyed the shadow in his office, and I enjoyed the hyper-reality of this cream colored waiting room. It was all as clean as a Hollywood film, polished to a digital sheen. In this office selling sight the waiting room was bustling with female visions, clean and anonymous. And the doctor was literally invisible.
Maybe some of these women had once held vague dreams of medicine, those wisps of ambition cutting off here: a smile behind a desk job and a paycheck they can keep as long as their skin stays smooth. Maybe they only dream of working until they marry a nice man with a fine job: a doctor. But who can say what they really wanted all along? Our desires and sense of the possible only stretch as far as we can see.
I heard my name called, the syllables blocky in Japanese syllables, and picked up my contacts, bagged and taped in blue plastic by the woman behind the desk. It was probably my new contacts, but I could have sworn she flickered in a digital blip as she smiled and thanked me. As I turned to leave I nearly ran into a guy about my age slouching out from the bathroom, skin tanned nut brown, hair permed and spiky, a red coat emblazoned with the store logo barely holding his rangy and jumpy body. He gave the desk girl a sly smile, swooped up a new basket of promotional tissues and turned down the hall in one fluid motion. He held the door for me and we walked out together into the clattering street coughing with heat and people.
Monday, May 16, 2005
my dictionaries
If all the books had a party dictionaries would be the boring uncle in the corner, taking conversations literally and eating all the bean dip. Even the other reference books would fare better, thesauruses with their flowery stories about nothing and encyclopedias keeping their blandly told anecdotes bobbing with factoids. My dictionaries did nothing more than prop up my novels until I started seriously studying Japanese, spending a several hours everyday with these stodgy little uncles. They can be pretty damn amusing actually.
Learning a foreign language your choice of dictionary can seriously affect your day to day routine, and suddenly that bookshelf fixture you always took for granted is the only thing between you and opening a bank account. Like any book you spend a bit of time with, you start to wonder about the author. Where is she from? What is she like? Why do so many of the example sentences in here ring with resentment towards younger sisters?
Bought within a few weeks of first coming here, “The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary” (Editor in Chief Jack Halpern) has been the single best reference book I have ever had the pleasure to use. It is bound like a Gideons bible, floppy plastic crimson cover over its paperback spine. I have bored more than a few people enthusing about this kanji dictionary, but the fact is the thing is awesome. It uses a simple and logical system that reinvents the process of organizing characters, and provides extensive examples on meaning and core usage. It is also the only dictionary I’ve ever encountered with extensive biographical information of the editor, a photo of him on the inside jacket cover, grinning like an employee of the month in his tweed suit and accountant’s haircut. In the foreword to the dictionary (yes, there’s a foreword), University of Hawaii Professor of Japanese Agnes M. Niyekawa talks about Jack with the enthusiasm that only real language geeks like us can really appreciate.
“Only someone like Jack Halpern, who learned seven languages before Japanese, and has since added five other languages, could have conceived of such an extraordinary dictionary that is ideally suited to learners… Jack Halpern did not waste his time day dreaming, but embarked upon the project within a year of his arrival in Japan.”
I’ve thought about writing a fan letter to Jack care of the publisher, asking if he’s ever going to edit a sequel.
Although it has considerably less personality, “The Yellow Book” covered the other major hurdle in my Japanese study, grammar. Recommended to me by a former Mormon housemate who learned Japanese while having doors slammed in his face, “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” covers just about every major basic grammatical formation in a thorough, rigorous and thoroughly bland manner. I don’t know why, but copying down their example sentences always made me giggle. E.g.
Bakari, a particle which indicates that s.t. is the only thing or state which exists, or the only action s.o. will take, takes, is taking or took. Example: “Dezato wa taberu dake ni natte imasu. (Lit.) The only thing left to do with desert is to eat it.”
~garu, an auxiliary verb attached to a psychological/physiological adjective meaning a person other than the speaker shows signs of ~. Example: “Ueda-san wa aisu-krimu o tabeta gatta. Mr. Ueda showed signs of wanting to eat ice cream.”
But no dictionary hits the proper balance of useful reference and amusing reading quite like “A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters” by Kenneth G. Henshall. I discovered “A Guide...” sitting innocently on a shelf in the East Asian Studies section of my school library. Henshall (actually, let’s call him Ken), doesn’t get Jack Halpern’s star treatment, remaining blessedly anonymous. But while Jack simply created a lookup system and oversaw a staff that implemented it, we spend all of “A Guide...” with Ken, wading through short passages that explain the origins and changing meanings of the standard two thousand characters in the Japanese writing system.
While the lions share of entries are straightforward explanations, (Hashi: Bridge. [The left side] is “wood”, [the right side] is “tall”, thus “tall wooded structure” which came to be associated specifically with bridges), one does occasionally come across some real howlers. “Kan: Government, Official. [The upper section] is “roof.” [The lower section] is “buttocks”, here acting phonetically to express “work” and almost certainly also lending an idea of “sedentary”. Thus “person doing sedentary work in a building”, which came to have particular associations with an official doing work for the government.” I really dig Ken’s deadpan delivery on that one.
But the crowning jewel of “A Guide...” is the entry on the character for “trade”, where Ken loses his cool and shows us a bit of the rage that drives the hardcore etymologist. While most character entries take up a third of a page at the most, the “trade” entry spills over three quarters of the page, barely holding in the essay he clearly had in mind. Ken cuts down any conflicting theories on the character left and right, first brushing aside anyone who would mistake it for a combination of “ sell” and “mouth”, then pushing with disturbing intensity his own theory:
[The lower section] is almost certainly “spread thighs”, the plumpness indicating female thighs, with “opening” added to indicate vagina. [The upper section] is the early form of needle, which was often used to symbolize “pierce/penetrate.” Thus this character appears to have originally meant “vaginal penetration”, i.e. “copulation.” From this point the link with trade seems clear, i.e. the worlds oldest trade of prostitution.
In case you had any doubts or were listening to any other etymologists, Ken spends the rest of the page attacking other theories that try to explain “trade” as a variant of “tall” or who explain the presence of the vagina radical as a purely phonetic borrowing. As Ken witheringly puts it “This does not seem especially convincing.” He’s holding onto to his plump thighs and penetrated vaginas come hell or high water.
Now your dictionary may have a cleaner and more pared down version of “trade”, but let me tell you, I never forgot that character again.
Learning a foreign language your choice of dictionary can seriously affect your day to day routine, and suddenly that bookshelf fixture you always took for granted is the only thing between you and opening a bank account. Like any book you spend a bit of time with, you start to wonder about the author. Where is she from? What is she like? Why do so many of the example sentences in here ring with resentment towards younger sisters?
Bought within a few weeks of first coming here, “The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary” (Editor in Chief Jack Halpern) has been the single best reference book I have ever had the pleasure to use. It is bound like a Gideons bible, floppy plastic crimson cover over its paperback spine. I have bored more than a few people enthusing about this kanji dictionary, but the fact is the thing is awesome. It uses a simple and logical system that reinvents the process of organizing characters, and provides extensive examples on meaning and core usage. It is also the only dictionary I’ve ever encountered with extensive biographical information of the editor, a photo of him on the inside jacket cover, grinning like an employee of the month in his tweed suit and accountant’s haircut. In the foreword to the dictionary (yes, there’s a foreword), University of Hawaii Professor of Japanese Agnes M. Niyekawa talks about Jack with the enthusiasm that only real language geeks like us can really appreciate.
“Only someone like Jack Halpern, who learned seven languages before Japanese, and has since added five other languages, could have conceived of such an extraordinary dictionary that is ideally suited to learners… Jack Halpern did not waste his time day dreaming, but embarked upon the project within a year of his arrival in Japan.”
I’ve thought about writing a fan letter to Jack care of the publisher, asking if he’s ever going to edit a sequel.
Although it has considerably less personality, “The Yellow Book” covered the other major hurdle in my Japanese study, grammar. Recommended to me by a former Mormon housemate who learned Japanese while having doors slammed in his face, “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” covers just about every major basic grammatical formation in a thorough, rigorous and thoroughly bland manner. I don’t know why, but copying down their example sentences always made me giggle. E.g.
Bakari, a particle which indicates that s.t. is the only thing or state which exists, or the only action s.o. will take, takes, is taking or took. Example: “Dezato wa taberu dake ni natte imasu. (Lit.) The only thing left to do with desert is to eat it.”
~garu, an auxiliary verb attached to a psychological/physiological adjective meaning a person other than the speaker shows signs of ~. Example: “Ueda-san wa aisu-krimu o tabeta gatta. Mr. Ueda showed signs of wanting to eat ice cream.”
But no dictionary hits the proper balance of useful reference and amusing reading quite like “A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters” by Kenneth G. Henshall. I discovered “A Guide...” sitting innocently on a shelf in the East Asian Studies section of my school library. Henshall (actually, let’s call him Ken), doesn’t get Jack Halpern’s star treatment, remaining blessedly anonymous. But while Jack simply created a lookup system and oversaw a staff that implemented it, we spend all of “A Guide...” with Ken, wading through short passages that explain the origins and changing meanings of the standard two thousand characters in the Japanese writing system.
While the lions share of entries are straightforward explanations, (Hashi: Bridge. [The left side] is “wood”, [the right side] is “tall”, thus “tall wooded structure” which came to be associated specifically with bridges), one does occasionally come across some real howlers. “Kan: Government, Official. [The upper section] is “roof.” [The lower section] is “buttocks”, here acting phonetically to express “work” and almost certainly also lending an idea of “sedentary”. Thus “person doing sedentary work in a building”, which came to have particular associations with an official doing work for the government.” I really dig Ken’s deadpan delivery on that one.
But the crowning jewel of “A Guide...” is the entry on the character for “trade”, where Ken loses his cool and shows us a bit of the rage that drives the hardcore etymologist. While most character entries take up a third of a page at the most, the “trade” entry spills over three quarters of the page, barely holding in the essay he clearly had in mind. Ken cuts down any conflicting theories on the character left and right, first brushing aside anyone who would mistake it for a combination of “ sell” and “mouth”, then pushing with disturbing intensity his own theory:
[The lower section] is almost certainly “spread thighs”, the plumpness indicating female thighs, with “opening” added to indicate vagina. [The upper section] is the early form of needle, which was often used to symbolize “pierce/penetrate.” Thus this character appears to have originally meant “vaginal penetration”, i.e. “copulation.” From this point the link with trade seems clear, i.e. the worlds oldest trade of prostitution.
In case you had any doubts or were listening to any other etymologists, Ken spends the rest of the page attacking other theories that try to explain “trade” as a variant of “tall” or who explain the presence of the vagina radical as a purely phonetic borrowing. As Ken witheringly puts it “This does not seem especially convincing.” He’s holding onto to his plump thighs and penetrated vaginas come hell or high water.
Now your dictionary may have a cleaner and more pared down version of “trade”, but let me tell you, I never forgot that character again.
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