The history of the world as told by charisma shop staffs

[imomus]

Shohei Imamura's History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (which Hisae and I watched last night) is a great film, a 1970 documentary that interweaves newsreel coverage of postwar events with the bar's-eye-view of a garrulous, brash, sex- and company-loving woman, the beehive-haired Onboro-San. When the Korean war breaks out, Onboro is having an affair with a barman. While students occupy the university, Onboro is having problems with her policeman boyfriend.

Onboro's concerns are very different from the concerns of newspapers, but history in the newspaper sense does impact her, mostly in the form of passing anxieties that don't really lead anywhere, and certainly don't distract her from running her bar or having children by a large number of different men. Imamura's point is that Onboro's world is as much "the real world" as the newspapers' world is. And although I'm someone who checks the news headlines several times a day, it got me thinking that one index of happiness is the degree to which you can ignore that newspaper world. The degree to which you can elevate a personal reality above the sometimes crazy and usually inconsequential lurches of "history".



I got to wondering about how one might remake Imamura's film today, and picked a narrator Hisae and I have recently become fascinated with: Yama-Sama, one of the shop staff at Tokyo Bopper, a Harajuku boutique specializing in nu-rave hiking gear. Yama-Sama blogs regularly at Merry Daily, whose motto is the rousing "Now, select me as a tool for changes!"

Yama-Sama's worldview ignores completely the sub-prime crisis in the US housing market, Israel's declaration of Gaza "a hostile entity", the possibility of bombing raids on Iran and the irony that it's now France which seems to be touting them, or the opening up of a free water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific through the devastated ice of a north pole warmed by polar bear blood and car exhaust fumes. Instead, Yama-Sama is currently preoccupied with Tyrolean style, tartan, Northern European folk patterns, repurposed camping gear, the Cool Vienna blog, berets, smiley t-shirts and Argyle sweaters.



Yama-Sama does occasionally hint at wider issues. Gender politics, for instance, is evident in statements like "I wanna wear this like tough boots even I am a girl! I'm trying on Men's new trekking shoes". And an art school education is hinted at in the pronouncement that "even though it's avant-garde, the colourful makeup is still pretty". The syntax marks Yama out as something of an aesthetic conservative, despite her different-coloured laces and her mixture of Pringle classics with early 90s rave references.

Battles don't figure in Yama-Sama's life -- unless you're talking about the band Battles. "I'm listening this often these days," says Yama's colleague Tabi, who's playing the "Mirrored" album in the shop. "Sometimes it sounds like a hard dance music or rock'n'roll. But it partly sounds like a opera! It's very stimulous."

[Error: unknown template video]

I'd treat Yama-Sama and her fellow "charisma shop staffs" with at least as much respect as Imamura shows for his bar hostess. I don't know whether Israel's declaration of the Palestinians as "hostile" is evidence that Tony Blair has failed in his new job, or simply a bit of stage management to give Condi Rice some appearance of success in her current Middle East mission. I don't know if the McCanns killed their own daughter. I don't know if "Bin Laden" really exists. I don't know if the New York family living without electricity is doing it to save the planet or because they want to make a lot of money (and destroy a lot of trees) by writing a bestselling book about it.

What I suspect is that much of what fills newspapers is theatre of a cheap and unedifying kind; spectacle management. I feel like a dupe, sometimes, for following it, for getting angry or anxious or disgusted on cue. And that's why someone like Yama-Sama can be a sort of hero to me. Yama-Sama generates her own narrative lines and follows them with passionate enthusiasm. And who's to say she's not living in the real world?