Tokyo, let me count the ways!
Dec. 11th, 2009 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt's hardly going to be headline-grabbing news for readers of this blog that I love Tokyo more than any other place on the planet. Re-immersing myself in this city gives me a chance to count the ways and the whys, though.
In the brief time I've been here I've done a ton of stuff. I went to Vege Shokudo in Koenji to eat old friend Yoyo's excellent vegetable curry, and found a posse of Tokyo Art Beat writers assembled there, including Cameron McKean and Darryl Jingwen Wee.
After the meal Yoyo took me out onto the narrow alley to meet the Shiroto No Ran storekeepers, including Hajime Matsumoto, who gave a talk about the collective in Berlin in October.
The man in the red-framed glasses below (he remakes secondhand clothes by stitching on playful motifs borrowed from cigarette packets, combini uniforms, and so on, a bit like Andrea Crews in Paris) then guided us to the legendary Asoko clubhouse, up a side-street. Nobody was there, but it was a thrill to locate it.
The next day I had lunch with Yukiko Sawabe, whose work I wrote about recently on my Art-It blog. We went to organic food basement Crayon House, then dropped into Gallery 360 (showing Yoko Ono's pistol-cracked glass plates) and Utrecht reading room, which is a pleasingly understated but immaculately-curated gallery and art bookshop on Omote Sando.
Then, taking in the new Nezu Museum and Junko Koshino's imperious building overlooking the Azabu expressway, we headed to the French Embassy in Hiroo, which has a really great show on called No Man's Land, a sort of art school degree show in which French and Japanese artists have been given individual rooms in a warren-like, slightly dilapidated building to make over as they see fit. It was nice to see a Love and Hate Bento Box video in one featuring Roger McDonald, and a painting by Audrey Fondecave featuring Mai Ueda and Cyril Duval as Holbein's Ambassadors in another.
But if I love Tokyo it's the surrounding context -- the thing producing events and encounters like these -- that deserves the credit. You really only sense something as abstract as a context interstitially, in slipping glimpses as you scurry from appointment to appointment. And yet these glimpses contain the magic that fuels the city, and your love for it.
So here's a paragraph of those glimpses, so frail, so fragmentary and yet so forceful. The tiling in the Citibank lobby on Aoyama Dori. The wooden mailboxes outside Utrecht. A transparently delicate schoolgirl reading a book on the stairs at Ebisu subway station. The 5 o'clock music transforming Meguro into Prospero's island (Shakespeare did travel to Japan; one day I'll make a film about it). The sense of complete safety; I can wear the most ridiculous clothes without fear of embarrassment or assault. Never having to worry about prying hands near my wallet, even in the densest crowd. A sense of being, if not in the future, at least in a parallel world where people are quite a bit more refined, well-mannered and intelligent than I'm used to. A pervading calm inhibition. The mechanical tenderness of soothing lift music. The women, their manner, their faces, their legs, their hair.
Oh Tokyo, let me count the ways!
In the brief time I've been here I've done a ton of stuff. I went to Vege Shokudo in Koenji to eat old friend Yoyo's excellent vegetable curry, and found a posse of Tokyo Art Beat writers assembled there, including Cameron McKean and Darryl Jingwen Wee.
After the meal Yoyo took me out onto the narrow alley to meet the Shiroto No Ran storekeepers, including Hajime Matsumoto, who gave a talk about the collective in Berlin in October.
The man in the red-framed glasses below (he remakes secondhand clothes by stitching on playful motifs borrowed from cigarette packets, combini uniforms, and so on, a bit like Andrea Crews in Paris) then guided us to the legendary Asoko clubhouse, up a side-street. Nobody was there, but it was a thrill to locate it.
The next day I had lunch with Yukiko Sawabe, whose work I wrote about recently on my Art-It blog. We went to organic food basement Crayon House, then dropped into Gallery 360 (showing Yoko Ono's pistol-cracked glass plates) and Utrecht reading room, which is a pleasingly understated but immaculately-curated gallery and art bookshop on Omote Sando.
Then, taking in the new Nezu Museum and Junko Koshino's imperious building overlooking the Azabu expressway, we headed to the French Embassy in Hiroo, which has a really great show on called No Man's Land, a sort of art school degree show in which French and Japanese artists have been given individual rooms in a warren-like, slightly dilapidated building to make over as they see fit. It was nice to see a Love and Hate Bento Box video in one featuring Roger McDonald, and a painting by Audrey Fondecave featuring Mai Ueda and Cyril Duval as Holbein's Ambassadors in another.
But if I love Tokyo it's the surrounding context -- the thing producing events and encounters like these -- that deserves the credit. You really only sense something as abstract as a context interstitially, in slipping glimpses as you scurry from appointment to appointment. And yet these glimpses contain the magic that fuels the city, and your love for it.
So here's a paragraph of those glimpses, so frail, so fragmentary and yet so forceful. The tiling in the Citibank lobby on Aoyama Dori. The wooden mailboxes outside Utrecht. A transparently delicate schoolgirl reading a book on the stairs at Ebisu subway station. The 5 o'clock music transforming Meguro into Prospero's island (Shakespeare did travel to Japan; one day I'll make a film about it). The sense of complete safety; I can wear the most ridiculous clothes without fear of embarrassment or assault. Never having to worry about prying hands near my wallet, even in the densest crowd. A sense of being, if not in the future, at least in a parallel world where people are quite a bit more refined, well-mannered and intelligent than I'm used to. A pervading calm inhibition. The mechanical tenderness of soothing lift music. The women, their manner, their faces, their legs, their hair.
Oh Tokyo, let me count the ways!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 01:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 01:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 09:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 01:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 09:23 pm (UTC)I do find massively arrogant the idea that the Japanese would need to import from the West an ideology about how to be a woman; the society clearly has its own ways of doing that, which include, by some accounts, a period of actual matriarchy whose traces are still visible today. I also find it very sad that someone would characterise feminism as a struggle to minimise the value males place on a female's secondary sexual characteristics. Now that would be a project doomed in advance.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 09:46 pm (UTC)The Japanese women I know are (by my arrogant Western reckoning) pretty damned feminist and find being ogled at by men (Western or Japanese) really horrible. But why should I believe them when you (Scottish, male) obviously have a much better grasp on their (Japanese, female) culture than they do?
I'll tell them next time we talk that in order to properly embrace their own culture they really need to just put up with the sexual harrassment. To do otherwise would be to bow to our ghastly Western ideology about how to be a woman.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 10:17 pm (UTC)Perhaps men should be blinded at birth? Would that make you happy?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 10:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 11:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 11:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 12:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 12:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 12:32 pm (UTC)All I asked was whether looking constituted sexual harrassment... only for a torrent of bile and paranoia to be unleashed. Your original comments seemed, and still seem to me, a remarkably overwrought reaction to an activity we all indulge in, looking. It's what our eyes are for. I'm then treated to threats of physical mutilation, grotesque,and inaccurate, accusations of prejudice and, as if that weren't enough, you drag in poor old momus (and if there is one thing that seems very clear about him, he's hardly the type to need to or want to pretend to be somebody else).
Anonymous, yes (not that "bonsai_human" is giving much away) and the reason for that is that there are too many crazies out there. You fill in the blanks.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 12:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 07:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 09:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-13 10:14 pm (UTC)This bizarre hatred of physical form isn't western, but it is a perversion rooted in puritanism. The male gaze is a crock - a meaningless formulation trotted out to damn men whatever they do, conveniently ignoring to gaze appreciatively is what both genders do. A convenient stick... (if you'll forgive the allusion).
lolz
Date: 2009-12-12 07:16 am (UTC)Re: lolz
Date: 2009-12-13 12:27 am (UTC)But yes, cultural relativism does generally imply that you let different cultures get on with ordering things their own way. I find it hard to understand why it's such a hard sell. Oh yes, clitorectomy! The metonymic standby for all unacceptable otherness! Nurse, the rhetorical scalpel!
Re: lolz
Date: 2009-12-13 09:14 pm (UTC)Re: lolz
Date: 2009-12-13 09:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 02:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 03:51 pm (UTC)Maybe if we ignore all this creativity, it will go away. God willing.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 08:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 03:21 am (UTC)moomoo
Date: 2009-12-11 03:43 am (UTC)but I can understand.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 05:25 am (UTC)Well, where's the fun in that? ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 06:08 pm (UTC)Oh Tokyo, where's the fun
Date: 2009-12-12 04:52 am (UTC)It's odd he arrives after that UFO appearance last nite.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 06:18 am (UTC)99%
Date: 2009-12-11 06:51 am (UTC)i swear, i'll often hear the exact same "anthology of current western hits" in completely different establishments...it's, well, insidious.
aye queue
Date: 2009-12-11 09:16 am (UTC)Re: aye queue
Date: 2009-12-11 09:53 am (UTC)then add their parents' economic class to that
Re: aye queue
Date: 2009-12-11 05:26 pm (UTC)out of ten
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 09:34 am (UTC)the "guy in red glasses"
Date: 2009-12-11 10:33 am (UTC)http://imomus.livejournal.com/314837.html
when you called his used clothing shop an "art gallery"
neonwondergirl
Re: the "guy in red glasses"
Date: 2009-12-11 06:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 01:24 pm (UTC)Now that's an interesting statement, though my slant is different from Whimsy's whose attention was caught by the statement, too.
I always thought that Momus wears his clothes pretty much fearlessly and admired him for it. I'm a very shy person and would probably collapse with agony when wearing some of his outfits! (This is of course not to say that I don't like them...)
FrF
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 04:01 pm (UTC)But then, wearing a velvet suit in South Philly adds interest to a person's day: you take nothing for granted. Every step becomes an adventure.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 05:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 03:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 05:20 pm (UTC)Photo Question..
Date: 2009-12-11 06:26 pm (UTC)Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-11 08:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 09:47 am (UTC)fais la bise à Yoyo de ma part!
Olivier
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-12 07:26 pm (UTC)This one's for Whimsy:
captcha: Philadelphia jauntier
jauntier(adj.): marked by smartness in dress and manners
Ikidyounot.