Hecuba, Singh, Osaka
Dec. 5th, 2009 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm in Osaka, jet-lagged but happy, eating sashimi and about to go soak in a sento.
The sequence of views from my Airbus window this morning was fascinating. First Mongolia, snowy moonlit high plains in the grey of dawn, looking like the surface of the moon. Then China, flat and vast. The rivers and quays around Beijing are shaped by man, and the ground sparkles with new, silvery industrial buildings. Smoke stacks throw plumes.
Then there's the extraordinary promontory of Dalian, with crinkly red mountains and affluent cities; the last part of China before the Yellow Sea and North Korea. Our route, as the crow flies, should take us through North Korea, but we fly carefully around it. We don't want to be mistaken for spies.
South Korea is amazingly slender, and Seoul ( on the seatback route map) surprisingly close to the DPRK border, and not far from Pyong Yang. Through little fluffy white clouds I see Seoul's high, boxy apartment blocks. I've been watching a Korean TV show on the plane entertainment system; tidy mother and messy mother swap apartments. The Korean flats shown are in exactly these big boxes, much larger than Japanese living spaces, with gigantic sofas and hypertrophic plasma TVs with Dolby cine-surround speaker systems. The rooms are all lit with overhead fluorescent light. The tables are low, like Japanese ones, but the colours are completely different from Japanese colours.
There's a little turbulence over the Sea of Japan, but soon we're descending over Fukuoka. Japan looks like an enchanted land, so different from the lugubrious, hostile and vast landscapes the plane has traversed so far. Suddenly there are wooded mountains with little clouds nestled in nooks and temples poised on top. There are the sandy-beached islands of the Seto Inland Sea, which we'll be investigating in January. There are shiny new bridges linking the echanted Pacific isles to each other. There are sudden cities (that's Shikuoka, and here comes Osaka) poured into the plains between forested mountains. This whole thing shouldn't really be here: the archipelago has pushed a series of volcanic heads out of the sea, but they remain dreamlike and somehow enchanted.
Soon we land on the artificial island which is Kansai International airport, and I'm marveling at... Well, I'm grumbling at the fact that striking Finnish baggage handlers have ensured that our luggage wasn't on the flight. But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion.
The luggage claim girl smiles sweetly, the currency exchange man fans and flick-counts my yen like a magician, and on the train to Tennoji a trainee steward is being choreographed by a supervisor through her duties, and making white-gloved gestures as precise and attentive as those of the man who guided our airbus to its docking bay, then bowed deeply to the Finnish plane.
The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known. And yet somehow this "poetry" is deeply effective; as I've been reading in my complimentary copy of the Financial Times, Japan is still vastly powerful: the four dominant blocks of our time, says the paper, are the US, Japan, Europe and China, with India and Brazil far behind. So this island that just pops out of the sea like a volcanic afterthought to continental Asia somehow continues to pack enormous civilisational clout.
Anyway, I didn't intend to string my first impressions out quite so far. I was going to say "here, jet-lagged, happy" then point you to two articles of mine which have just appeared: Discovering a new band in real time, a piece in Playground investigating a Californian band called Hecuba (photo above), and 800 Words with Alexandre Singh, my conversation with a young British lectures-based artist living in New York, published by Art in America.
The sequence of views from my Airbus window this morning was fascinating. First Mongolia, snowy moonlit high plains in the grey of dawn, looking like the surface of the moon. Then China, flat and vast. The rivers and quays around Beijing are shaped by man, and the ground sparkles with new, silvery industrial buildings. Smoke stacks throw plumes.
Then there's the extraordinary promontory of Dalian, with crinkly red mountains and affluent cities; the last part of China before the Yellow Sea and North Korea. Our route, as the crow flies, should take us through North Korea, but we fly carefully around it. We don't want to be mistaken for spies.
South Korea is amazingly slender, and Seoul ( on the seatback route map) surprisingly close to the DPRK border, and not far from Pyong Yang. Through little fluffy white clouds I see Seoul's high, boxy apartment blocks. I've been watching a Korean TV show on the plane entertainment system; tidy mother and messy mother swap apartments. The Korean flats shown are in exactly these big boxes, much larger than Japanese living spaces, with gigantic sofas and hypertrophic plasma TVs with Dolby cine-surround speaker systems. The rooms are all lit with overhead fluorescent light. The tables are low, like Japanese ones, but the colours are completely different from Japanese colours.
There's a little turbulence over the Sea of Japan, but soon we're descending over Fukuoka. Japan looks like an enchanted land, so different from the lugubrious, hostile and vast landscapes the plane has traversed so far. Suddenly there are wooded mountains with little clouds nestled in nooks and temples poised on top. There are the sandy-beached islands of the Seto Inland Sea, which we'll be investigating in January. There are shiny new bridges linking the echanted Pacific isles to each other. There are sudden cities (that's Shikuoka, and here comes Osaka) poured into the plains between forested mountains. This whole thing shouldn't really be here: the archipelago has pushed a series of volcanic heads out of the sea, but they remain dreamlike and somehow enchanted.
Soon we land on the artificial island which is Kansai International airport, and I'm marveling at... Well, I'm grumbling at the fact that striking Finnish baggage handlers have ensured that our luggage wasn't on the flight. But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion.
The luggage claim girl smiles sweetly, the currency exchange man fans and flick-counts my yen like a magician, and on the train to Tennoji a trainee steward is being choreographed by a supervisor through her duties, and making white-gloved gestures as precise and attentive as those of the man who guided our airbus to its docking bay, then bowed deeply to the Finnish plane.
The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known. And yet somehow this "poetry" is deeply effective; as I've been reading in my complimentary copy of the Financial Times, Japan is still vastly powerful: the four dominant blocks of our time, says the paper, are the US, Japan, Europe and China, with India and Brazil far behind. So this island that just pops out of the sea like a volcanic afterthought to continental Asia somehow continues to pack enormous civilisational clout.
Anyway, I didn't intend to string my first impressions out quite so far. I was going to say "here, jet-lagged, happy" then point you to two articles of mine which have just appeared: Discovering a new band in real time, a piece in Playground investigating a Californian band called Hecuba (photo above), and 800 Words with Alexandre Singh, my conversation with a young British lectures-based artist living in New York, published by Art in America.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 03:21 pm (UTC)Have fun -- I wish I was spending New Year in Japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 04:20 pm (UTC)Sing Your Life
Date: 2009-12-05 06:16 pm (UTC)viva you both this Yule
maf
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 08:25 pm (UTC)I'm so happy you are in Japan. If CO has to end, it is fitting that it should end there :)
(coincidentally, I wrote the words "pink-grey of dawn" in a letter this morning)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 09:27 pm (UTC)"Does that mean Mongolia-moon is lit by itself?" said editor would demand.
They have no sense of poetry, editors. Of course the mongolian moon is lit by itself!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 11:03 pm (UTC)good old kansai kuukou
Date: 2009-12-06 06:57 am (UTC)you're onto something about the secular/religious poetry thing; it's what zen aesthetics are all about, too (as you know)...
maybe see you in naniwa...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-06 01:57 pm (UTC)"But apart from that I'm struck by the super-niceness of all the Japanese employees I deal with, and the deep sense of superlegitimacy with which they do their jobs. Complete conviction, religious (but secular) devotion."
After all this time spent in Japan, is this really what you think? I'm certainly always impressed by standards of customer service in Japan, but at the same time I think of the miserable wages, the boredom, the sorrows within, that these people may be dreaming of something else entirely. I enjoy catching shop employees trying to outdo each other in the ridiculousness of their customer welcomes. I look forward to the day when they potentially rise up against their fat cat bosses and chuck them in the bay for landfill. Or not!
"The speckless cleanliness of everything, the escalator animated by a Shinto kami in the form of a voice telling you to take care, the extra-schoolgirlness of the schoolgirls, the strange medieval aspect of peasants tending microscopic fields, everything confirms my feeling that Japan is a religious society posing as a secular one, and that it's poetry compared with the prose of all other societies I've known."
This is a train from KIX towards Tennoji? I don't know what side of the train you're looking out of, but you see some rather speckled and downtrodden areas on the way in and despite recent developments and demolitions, Tennoji certainly isn't Aoyama or wherever. Thank the heavens!
But I do love this ending of poetry compared with prose! I suspect we hear a different poetry, especially perhaps in Osaka where it's a sound I much prefer to that of Tokyo. Because it is rather dirty in its way, certainly bawdy and much less of that pole-up-your-arse preciousness I get in the capital. Hmm, that's not quite the phrase I was after.
It's at this point I'd normally delete and get back to the cooking. Enjoy the holiday and all those sento!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-06 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-06 10:10 pm (UTC)Enjoy your food and bath!
to be fair
Date: 2009-12-06 10:27 pm (UTC)and yes, osaka is not the prettiest place in the world, to put it mildly, but nick is right about the trains being kept in rather good shape. again, because of the sheer frequency of usage, it's to be expected and is appreciated coming from california. here, trains are in museums.
original kansai kuukou poster
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-07 09:41 am (UTC)Those trains certainly are clean and a vast improvement on what I get here in London. I had two train annoyances recently after returning from Japan. The first was in France where two staff vehemently claimed that a possible TGV change didn't exist and as the slow train continued to crawl its way past Grenoble the electronic sign clearly showed it in fact did. A few stations down, a passenger getting off turned to me "Welcome to France!", he said rather sardonically.
Last week, I went to the station up the road, stood on the platform. The electronic sign read "This service currently una". After twenty minutes, I went upstairs and asked about the trains. "There are no trains" came the reply. "How am I supposed to know that?" "There's a sign over there" she said pointing at a poster hiding by the ticket machine. "Yes, but I don't see that on the way in, do I?" I said. Couldn't you make a sign you can see on the way to the platform? Turn off the ticketing machine that is now going to charge me £4 for an incomplete journey? Keep your eyes peeled for people walking into the station? Make the electronic sign read "No trains today. Sorry!"? As it was, she was unprepared to leave the ticket office to let the woman still standing on the platform know she should get on the bus instead. I wandered back down in her place to let the woman know and certainly mumbled about superlegitimacy amongst my cursing, with a decent sprinkling of robust Osaka-ben...
It's certainly not a word I'd have ever used were it not for Click Opera.