Horiemon's simple life

[imomus]

When I sat down to write my last Wired column, the Livedoor scandal had just broken here in Japan. Now, to journalists who tend to write about technology as if it were a business story, this would be the obvious thing to cover. But I'm not that kind of journalist. Maybe this is something to do with Wired being based in San Francisco; my column tends to look at the ways in which technology might make the future more utopian. So I wrote a rather poetic, idealistic piece about nostalgia for mud, detailing ways that affluence can come full circle back to an improved (and improving) form of poverty.

On Friday my friend Misa wrote me an excited e-mail telling me that Livedoor News had picked up the Wired column about nostalgia for mud and run it. All my Wired columns get translated into Japanese and run on the Hotwired Japan site (they also get fed to i-Mode). But this time, apparently, Livedoor had spotted the piece and liked the theme.

Now, I don't need to point out why an article saying that austerity may have a silver lining would appeal to a company whose shares have plummeted in value from over 600 yen to under 100, whose securities and accountancy violations are said to have wiped 6% off the Nikkei share index since January, and whose media-friendly president has gone from a Ferrari, a model girlfriend, and an apartment in Roppongi Hills to an austere police cell. Livedoor has every interest in wearing sackcloth and ashes for a while, and I'm delighted that my article proved to be a handy hair shirt for them.

However, the Slow Life theme is hardly one that Takafumi Horie himself is likely to endorse. Sitting in his three tatami police cell without access to a cellphone or computer, we can assume he didn't read my article. There in police custody, Horie leads the life of an anchorite. He's only allowed two baths a week, his toilet and basin are in full view of his warders, his window looks out on a blank wall, and he isn't allowed to lie down during daylight hours. Three days a week he's allowed a 30 minute exercise period.

Who knows, though, perhaps Horiemon will emerge from prison a changed man, some kind of Taoist sage and Slow Life advocate. (His advocacy matters; Koizumi won his postal privatization election partly thanks to choosing Horiemon as one of his assassins.) Perhaps he'll trade his luxury apartment for a Ryue Nishizawa house with an outside bathroom. Perhaps he'll agree with Lao Tzu: "In his world, he would have no rules. He would have people live simple and peaceful lives. They would find that their plain food is sweet, and that their simple clothes were fancy. They would have their war horses become plow horses. And their homes would then be happy places."

With the "no rules" bit he's already halfway there. Is the "no possessions" bit really such a stretch, Horiemon?

Comments

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

I would tend to think of his change from criminal to monastic as a bit more christian in nature than Taoist.

(not that business is your biggest concern, but the 6% has since been unwiped. The nikkei is doing quite fine.)

[(Anonymous)]

Goodnight fellow bloggers, see you all in the morning.

Owen.

Looks like everyone had a good weekend.

[nomorepolitics.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite students in Japan, who was under academic probation at the university (he was maybe the most intelligent and outspoken student I ever had), told me about some advice one of his professors gave him. "If you want perfect piece and quiet," he said, "and time to think and read books, the best thing to do is go to jail, they don't force you to do anything all day, except wash and make your bed." The professor continued by telling him a story of how he threw rocks at a police car, just to get himself locked up for a few months. Truth or fiction? I'm not sure.

Japanese detention centers are very safe compared to Western ones. I am currently writing a novel about a westerner who goes to jail in Japan, so I did extensive research and investigated the subject. I checked it out, and it's true, Japanese prisoners are just as polite as Japanese people are when you get to know them. You could spend a year there, and would seldom even hear a dirty word uttered. The guards are strict, but reasonable. Not that the system is perfect; you tend to be presumed guilty as soon as you enter the place.

Weather it is the kind of place that will inspire enlightenment is questionable. Japanese detention centers smell awful, like an old toilet that looks clean but stinks of E. coli and salmonella; and this smell even gets into the prisoners' food somehow. Doesn't the soul need sunlight, play, and fresh air? An environment that forces you to think too much, rather than feel with your body, is not an ideal place for enlightenment. Rather, it is a place where your body will rot away and distort your mind.

Tehching Hsieh.

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

(http://photobucket.com)

You've touched on something with your Wired piece and in the story of Horiemon that reminded me, tangentially, of the work of Tehching Hsieh, with whom I've just begun a correspondence. Hsieh was a hero of mine in grad school - an amazing conceptualist who renounced his role as an artist in 2000.

From www.one-year-performance.com:

"For the first One Year Performance, known informally as the Cage Piece, Hsieh spent an entire year locked inside a cage that he had constructed in his loft. It was much like being in a prison cell. Hsieh had nobody to talk to, nothing to read or listen to, and nothing to do, except think and count the days. Each day, he documented the ordeal by making a mark on the wall, and taking a photograph of himself. An assistant, with whom he did not exchange words, brought him food, and disposed of his wastes.

This first Performance is about solitude and isolation. It questions the inner limits of identity and being. Hsieh stripped himself down to the bare minimum of subsistence: not so much in terms of food, shelter, and clothing, as in terms of social contact, material comfort, and opportunities for amusement. We are sustained by our communication with others, and by the nourishment and stimulation that the outside world offers us. How much of all this can one give up, and still remain oneself? What does it mean to reduce the self to its narrowest possible compass? What does it mean to think, without the opportunity to communicate or record what we are thinking? Hsieh's performance may have been inspired by his own experiences of alienation as an illegal (at the time) immigrant in New York City. And the piece certainly resonates with the plight of political prisoners in solitary confinement around the world. But Hsieh's willing embrace of such a state of deprivation remains mysterious and unsettling."