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imomusApologies for the lapse in Click Opera service; I exchanged a web browser for a car windscreen from Friday to Monday and drove an automatic Daihatsu Naked onto Seto Inland Sea ferries and up and down the mountains of Shikoku. Hisae, Yoyo and I had so many adventures and saw so many inspiring sights it's hard to know where to begin, but I'll start with Japanese country style, which we all adopted after raiding a timewarp clothes shop in Kamiyama run by an 83 year-old lady.
We'd just descended the mountain after teasing the car along hilariously narrow one-track roads -- ledges, really, scarily steep and snowy at high altitudes -- when we discovered this shop. It seemed to be closed -- all the lights were off, and it was a Sunday -- but the girls tried the door, found it was unlocked, and went in. The decoration was very 1940s.
A cute little old lady soon appeared from the house next door and started shouting and laughing, asking us questions and telling us her age proudly.
We all bought padded slacks and jackets, and I got a sort of mini rucksack bag and some pink socks. I was tempted by some elasticated floral forearm covers that hook over a finger (the farmers' version of armlets forming part of the kuroko or kabuki stagehand costume I was wearing in New York last year, which suggests a link between farmers and theatre), but found the patterns too feminine in the end. The clothes made us look like the agricultural workers (often very elderly) we'd been seeing from the car working in the fields, sometimes high up in the mountains. Here's what I look like in my outfit (which cost about $30 in total):
In some of the supermarkets in small towns in Japan you get local produce sections where photographs of the producers of particular local foodstuffs are displayed alongside their wares. I find this fascinating, not just because we so rarely see the makers of the things we buy in stores, or because making small producers visible is a step towards my vision of input-output shops, but because the "fashion" displayed in the photographs is so bloody great.
Here's a selection of snaps of the garb worn by farmers working on either side of the Seto Inland Sea. In a way some of these stern, kind people resemble the Shakers, but they're also rather like feudal peasants. A lot of roadside Japan looks feudal, but it's a horizontal feudalism where everyone is liege and serf by turn.
We'd just descended the mountain after teasing the car along hilariously narrow one-track roads -- ledges, really, scarily steep and snowy at high altitudes -- when we discovered this shop. It seemed to be closed -- all the lights were off, and it was a Sunday -- but the girls tried the door, found it was unlocked, and went in. The decoration was very 1940s.
A cute little old lady soon appeared from the house next door and started shouting and laughing, asking us questions and telling us her age proudly.
We all bought padded slacks and jackets, and I got a sort of mini rucksack bag and some pink socks. I was tempted by some elasticated floral forearm covers that hook over a finger (the farmers' version of armlets forming part of the kuroko or kabuki stagehand costume I was wearing in New York last year, which suggests a link between farmers and theatre), but found the patterns too feminine in the end. The clothes made us look like the agricultural workers (often very elderly) we'd been seeing from the car working in the fields, sometimes high up in the mountains. Here's what I look like in my outfit (which cost about $30 in total):
In some of the supermarkets in small towns in Japan you get local produce sections where photographs of the producers of particular local foodstuffs are displayed alongside their wares. I find this fascinating, not just because we so rarely see the makers of the things we buy in stores, or because making small producers visible is a step towards my vision of input-output shops, but because the "fashion" displayed in the photographs is so bloody great.Here's a selection of snaps of the garb worn by farmers working on either side of the Seto Inland Sea. In a way some of these stern, kind people resemble the Shakers, but they're also rather like feudal peasants. A lot of roadside Japan looks feudal, but it's a horizontal feudalism where everyone is liege and serf by turn.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 04:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 05:07 pm (UTC)Pok was being a bit bad yesterday and the day before btw. Every time we took him out he was marking his territory. I had to change my trousers 3 times in 24 hours. He was looking relaxed this afternoon though - he likes to hang out under my desk when I am working on the computer. Sometimes he tries to steal things out of that red bucket beside him:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iloveacomputer/4265849693/
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 06:27 am (UTC)See you next week, we're back Monday evening!
samourai fashion from the chanel house
Date: 2010-01-11 05:53 pm (UTC)http://pinktentacle.com/2010/01/chanel-samurai-armor/
Re: samourai fashion from the chanel house
Date: 2010-01-12 03:29 am (UTC)Re: samourai fashion from the chanel house
Date: 2010-01-12 10:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 11:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 01:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 03:31 am (UTC)your almost 100%
Date: 2010-01-12 03:39 am (UTC)here let me help you out a bit...
The liberal Yin is the fascist Yang?
Date: 2010-01-12 08:24 am (UTC)How do we know that the inhabitants of a Tokyo subway are not pining for loud football fans with beer cans to really shake things up? Of course they aren't! But they'll never really know if we destroy the finest export we can offer a host - our difference.
Re: The liberal Yin is the fascist Yang?
Date: 2010-01-12 09:23 am (UTC)To break out of the yin and yang of local and global (ie "glocal", because they're so tightly bound together) is difficult. Do I dress as a trad Scotsman in Japan? That's the style (Pringle, Harris tweed) Japanese buy when they come as tourists to Scotland. Do they codemn me to sameness if they pull on their new clothes in the hotel and walk down Princes Street wearing a kilt? Not really. I'm amused, as the Japanese are when I do the equivalent thing here. (PS: I pay much, much less! Those Royal Mile shops are a rip-off!)
Re: The liberal Yin is the fascist Yang?
Date: 2010-01-12 02:01 pm (UTC)Re: The liberal Yin is the fascist Yang?
Date: 2010-01-12 02:32 pm (UTC)Re: The liberal Yin is the fascist Yang?
Date: 2010-01-12 05:08 pm (UTC)ok your showing your true colors... how do we 'know' that of course they dont want football fans. And why is it in anyway up to us to critic this, from that angle.
thats idea still smells of imperialism...
its not what you do but how you do it.
Re: The liberal Yin is the fascist Yang?
Date: 2010-01-12 07:56 pm (UTC)Daihatsu hard
Date: 2010-01-12 06:37 am (UTC)Re: Daihatsu hard
Date: 2010-01-12 09:53 am (UTC)Hard luck ...
There was a reasonably good turn out, between 20 and 30 audience members. In addition to upper-level students from our 映像学部 (College of Image Arts and Sciences), we had three attendees who came from off campus as a result of your announcement: two Americans came from Kobe, and Japanese guy working in traditional arts & crafts from Nishijin, the nearby kimono district.
Instead of your lecture I showed them Zbig Rybczynski's "Fourth Dimension", which I had been wanting to show my seminar students for some time, then had a fairly good discussion afterwards. So all was not lost ...
Felt a bit sorry for the two who travelled all the way from Kobe, though.
Your welcome next time, if schedules & budget allows. I strongly recommend, however, taking the train!
- Michael
Re: Daihatsu hard
Date: 2010-01-12 12:27 pm (UTC)Sorry, Kobe people! Ironically, I was in Kobe twice this weekend. Could've given a lecture in Chinatown, or in the Indian veggie restaurant Kusumu.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 11:57 am (UTC)Bise à Yoyo
Olivier
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 01:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 04:04 pm (UTC)The fact is that young people are leaving rural areas ASAP because of a lack of jobs and kids from rural areas are statistically much less likely to be able to attend prestigious universities than those from urban areas. People from urban areas look down on the country like whoah, if that weren't the case, why would 田舎臭い be an insult? It's my opinion that Japan fetishizes big-city wealth just as much as your average Western county .
花より団子 = Gossip Girl
Hybrid Counter-Culture of the Edo-Renaissance Men and Women
Date: 2010-01-12 09:42 pm (UTC)Also, there might be some Mori-Matsuri-Camera-Girls (森マツカメ - sorry lost the link) hiding in the hills somewhere...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:25 pm (UTC)Japan retains feudal-style gestures, but is clearly a modern democracy, and what's more one whose equality and collectivism is ahead of Western democracies (the only close liberal democracies, in Gini terms, are in Scandinavia).
You see horizontal feudalism every time you see two Japanese people bowing to each other. When two staff members from a car showroom come out onto the street and bow deeply before a departing customer's car, one of them wearing a peculiar ceremonial cape, the driver, glancing at the gesture in his rear-view mirror, is temporarily a liege lord. But when he gets to his own business he will bow deeply to his own customer. Horizontal feudalism.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-13 12:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-13 03:58 am (UTC)Nevertheless, this is clearly not in any meaningful sense a feudal nation, although it retains some feudal gestures and signs in ordinary commercial interactions between citizens.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-13 05:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 05:36 pm (UTC)and those little old ladies in the next to last picture are so cute I want to eat them right up!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 10:47 pm (UTC)Im coming over