Right about Japan
Aug. 14th, 2006 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt was a hot, flame-throwy weekend over on Neomarxisme, and the blog's shellshocked author emerged blinking into the Tokyo sunshine -- well, chilly rain, actually -- this morning requesting that people be less vituperative and recommending that "this blog should not read as a sole source of information on Japan". Sound advice. So, Marxy and the excellent Jean Snow aside, who's blogging interestingly about Japan in English? I've put some answers below, but mainly this is a question. I want all your Japan-related bookmark recommendations, please, people!
Alin Huma: Alin is an Australian artist living in Tokyo. His LiveJournal Akabe is highly visual; it's mostly photographs, like the view of his Tokyo room, above. When he writes text, it's close to conceptual art. Reversing Russian artist Aleksandra Mir's proposal to rename the streets of Tokyo using a "western coherent system", for instance, Alin suggests using the Japanese system to rename Paris streets. "An address would look like: Paris 10-2-15-28-16. If too clinical, the names of the arrondissements could be kept: Paris Magenta 2-15-28-16."
Shobus Diary: It ended last September, but the Shobus Diary kept by a bunch of Frenchmen who call themselves "odot, dabite barura, mehdiminifer, domo-san" is one of the most infectiously enthusiastic Japan blogs I've seen. Beautiful women, cool vehicles, progressive art galleries and universities, the singing of the semi... Japan seems to have organized all its most wonderful sights, sounds and smells around these men who walked through the land emitting love and digital sound. Domotique, back in France, summed it all up: "i wish i was still there. i stand on the left lane in the metro's escalators. i say "hai" to say "oui", i say "ikimacho" to say "on y va", i miss lozi and yoyo. i came back from geneva this morning and the train was full of japanese tourists, i wanted to talk to them in japanese, i wanted to share their bentos, i wanted to drink their tea."
Kissui: "Kissui.net is made by Yuki. She is a 20 year old anthropology student in Tokyo, Japan." One thing I like about Yuki is her outspokenness. She doesn't at all fit the usual Western stereotypes. Ozu once said that when Westerners don't understand Japan they call everything Zen; you could say that when Westerners don't understand Japanese women they call them either submissive or feisty. But they would never dare to describe the kind of feelings Yuki confesses: "Whenever I see a girl around my age wearing a ring on their left ring finger, I feel like a loser already. I lost to that woman! She may be fat, ugly, dumb, and her boyfriend may be a nerdy dorky geek, but hey, I lost. Yeah I admit it. I don’t want to feel this way! But since our paths to the future are pretty much all on the elite side career wise, the only thing we want to not become is be 30 years old, not married, and not have any children."
Aoki Takamasa: Aoki Takamasa, a Japanese musician based in Paris (you might know his work under the name of Silicom), has this week been commemorating the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. But he doesn't stop there; he's campaigning actively against the Rokkasho nuclear waste reprocessing plant in North Honshu. (Scroll down for English translations.)
Rinko Nikki: It's not in English, but in pictures. Photographer Rinko Kawauchi's keitai photography diary is the best place to understand what you'd actually be moving towards if you truly "Japanized" your life. Her July page, for instance, celebrates watermelons, bookstores, food, lanterns, cats, lavendar, snacks in porcelain, birds, plants, insects, the sky, art installations, public transport, children, the moon, forests, and flowers.
Rinko Nikki is now collected in a book. Keeping a copy by your pillow would be a great way to improve your dreams... and your life.
There's an interview with Rinko at (the highly recommended blogzine) Pingmag. "I prefer listening to the small voices in our world, those which whisper," she says. "I have a feeling I am always being saved by these whispers."
Alin Huma: Alin is an Australian artist living in Tokyo. His LiveJournal Akabe is highly visual; it's mostly photographs, like the view of his Tokyo room, above. When he writes text, it's close to conceptual art. Reversing Russian artist Aleksandra Mir's proposal to rename the streets of Tokyo using a "western coherent system", for instance, Alin suggests using the Japanese system to rename Paris streets. "An address would look like: Paris 10-2-15-28-16. If too clinical, the names of the arrondissements could be kept: Paris Magenta 2-15-28-16."
Shobus Diary: It ended last September, but the Shobus Diary kept by a bunch of Frenchmen who call themselves "odot, dabite barura, mehdiminifer, domo-san" is one of the most infectiously enthusiastic Japan blogs I've seen. Beautiful women, cool vehicles, progressive art galleries and universities, the singing of the semi... Japan seems to have organized all its most wonderful sights, sounds and smells around these men who walked through the land emitting love and digital sound. Domotique, back in France, summed it all up: "i wish i was still there. i stand on the left lane in the metro's escalators. i say "hai" to say "oui", i say "ikimacho" to say "on y va", i miss lozi and yoyo. i came back from geneva this morning and the train was full of japanese tourists, i wanted to talk to them in japanese, i wanted to share their bentos, i wanted to drink their tea."Kissui: "Kissui.net is made by Yuki. She is a 20 year old anthropology student in Tokyo, Japan." One thing I like about Yuki is her outspokenness. She doesn't at all fit the usual Western stereotypes. Ozu once said that when Westerners don't understand Japan they call everything Zen; you could say that when Westerners don't understand Japanese women they call them either submissive or feisty. But they would never dare to describe the kind of feelings Yuki confesses: "Whenever I see a girl around my age wearing a ring on their left ring finger, I feel like a loser already. I lost to that woman! She may be fat, ugly, dumb, and her boyfriend may be a nerdy dorky geek, but hey, I lost. Yeah I admit it. I don’t want to feel this way! But since our paths to the future are pretty much all on the elite side career wise, the only thing we want to not become is be 30 years old, not married, and not have any children."Aoki Takamasa: Aoki Takamasa, a Japanese musician based in Paris (you might know his work under the name of Silicom), has this week been commemorating the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. But he doesn't stop there; he's campaigning actively against the Rokkasho nuclear waste reprocessing plant in North Honshu. (Scroll down for English translations.)Rinko Nikki: It's not in English, but in pictures. Photographer Rinko Kawauchi's keitai photography diary is the best place to understand what you'd actually be moving towards if you truly "Japanized" your life. Her July page, for instance, celebrates watermelons, bookstores, food, lanterns, cats, lavendar, snacks in porcelain, birds, plants, insects, the sky, art installations, public transport, children, the moon, forests, and flowers.Rinko Nikki is now collected in a book. Keeping a copy by your pillow would be a great way to improve your dreams... and your life.
There's an interview with Rinko at (the highly recommended blogzine) Pingmag. "I prefer listening to the small voices in our world, those which whisper," she says. "I have a feeling I am always being saved by these whispers."
Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-14 04:44 pm (UTC)I usually find your blog very intelligent and interesting (when do you ever sleep?), but sadly, your rose-tinted visions of Japan are rarely more than a dreamy bubble of your own.
One day you boast about your ignorance of the Japanese language, and the fact that despite your deep interest in the country you can't be arsed to learn the language. (Curiously, that is an attitude I've ever only found among people with English as their first language - who then go on to claim that they are NOT imperialist, NOT chauvinistic, etc.)
The next day you want information about Japan in English. The problem, however, is that the Japanese language is at the very core of Japanese culture (very much so in contemporary art, for instance). Once rendered into English, the whole perspective changes, and whole chunks that do not translate well are just left out. It's like wearing a pair of tinted glasses with pieces of black tape attached to them blocking part of the view, and then pretending that the parts you can't see don't exist.
For example, I'm often extremely frustrated when going out with foreign friends who don't speak or read Japanese. When we're walking around looking for some place to eat or drink, they just walk past interesting izakaya etc. simply because the sign is in Japanese. They don't even seem to register that there is a bar or restaurant there at all! And if I do drag them into such a place, I will invariably have to translate the whole menu, order the food for everybody, etc. Instead, we usually wind up in a much less interesting place, that does, however, have an English menu. Silly, don't you think?
Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-14 04:59 pm (UTC)In your example, for instance, you make it sound as if your Anglophone friends have understood nothing about the best izakayas -- hardly even divined their presence -- because they couldn't read the signs or menus. However, these are mere preliminaries. When they have ordered (perhaps as I did when I first visited Japan, entirely at random, by pointing -- I still remember the fascinatingly disgusting taste of "congealed egg of the trpong"!) and the food and drink has arrived, they will experience the essence of the izakaya in the same degree of fulness as anyone else. And, if they're lucky, they will afterwards soak in a sento, and then go home to share a futon with a beautiful Japanese woman. Perhaps a light rain will fall on the tiled roof and a slight earth tremor will make the window pane rattle, and then the moon will come out. There is more to a culture than text.
Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-14 05:34 pm (UTC)They haven't. First of all, they haven't noticed the place. Not being able to READ is fine, but ignoring all you can't read as if it didn't exist is not.
Second, if I drag them in there, it's me who will have to do all the ordering.
Pointing is fine (it worked for me too the first time I came here), but plastic menus are not as common as they used to be, and what do you do the next time you want to eat congealed egg, but at a different place?
Oh absolutely. Food, for one thing. But there is also a large part that IS text. Literature, obviously, but also a lot of contemporary art, which we're both interested in. Slang. Names. Puns.
What you're describing is a (lucky) tourist experience, which some of my Anglophone friends are extending for years, but it is a very skewed view of the country as a whole.
No, what I'm suggesting is that you do try to learn Japanese. Your Metropolis piece notwithstanding, I'm fairly sure you won't regret it. Japanese is often orthogonal to (in particular American) English, and knowing both languages will make you able to think about many things in two strikingly different ways. And now with a Japanese wife and all, I think you owe it to her, and most definitely to her family, even if none of them will ever tell you so in so many words in English.
Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-14 05:59 pm (UTC)Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-14 06:51 pm (UTC)Eamonn
Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-15 04:13 am (UTC)I think my metaphor wouldn't be blindness per se, but rather the curious condition called "blindness denial", where the clinically blind patient denies that he/she is blind at all.
Linguistically, this relates to the smugness of monolingual speakers who claim that "English is sufficient to understand everything"
or even
"Anything interesting that can be said in one language can also be said in plain English" with its corollary, "Anything that cannot be said in plain English is uninteresting or unimportant"
or even the ultra-parochial/colonialist
"The natives persist in speaking Japanese (or whatever language) out of sheer perversity, when they could (should) be speaking 'properly' (ie. in English) instead".
While I certainly wouldn't accuse you of this last step, you might be surprised at how common this attitude actually is, explicitly or implicitly, even among otherwise intelligent people.
Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-15 03:58 am (UTC)なるほど、態度が変わったのね。じゃあ、がんばってね！
ちなみに、僕のブログは
http://kusagauma.blogspot.com
Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-14 11:57 pm (UTC)Re: Light about Japan
Date: 2006-08-15 06:43 am (UTC)