He gets all gushy about his favourite magazine

[imomus]

In Britain I spent a lot of time in art and design bookshops, flipping through magazines, researching an article I'm writing for AIGA Voice about design as religion and these bookshops as its chapels and temples. But I must say that, although I saw some nice magazines, none of them comes as close to the things of my heart as Japanese magazine Studio Voice, the latest issue of which, the Life in the Woods issue, was waiting for me in a pile of post when I got back to Berlin last night.



Now, you might say that the timing for this issue is not great; the tsunami has made nature seem less like a benign force, less like a good in itself, than it has for a long time. But trees and forests are a perennial symbol of nature's benign side, its healing and restorative properties. A whole issue of a culture magazine about them is welcome, and this issue more than repays its debt to the pulped trees which were needed to make the recycled paper it's printed on.

The issue proposes its themes as 'dialogue with the life of the forest, the will to freedom'. A quick flip-through gives an idea of the cultural reference points ('keywords', as the Japanese put it), even if you don't speak Japanese. Starting at the back, we get an article about 'Self-Build in the Woods'. Studio Voice has long run photos of self-built houses. (In other magazines and books recently it's been architecture features which have most excited me: Jonathan Glancey on the architecture of Antarctica in the Guardian the other day in an article entitled Cold Comfort, and a book about prefab architecture featuring the work of Adam Kalkin.)

Amidst gorgeous photos of woods and forests, lakes and mountains, Studio Voice continues with an article on the philosophers of the woods, Emerson, Thoreau, Muir and Leopold. The Japanese nature-love and Japanese thoroughness continues; there's an article on 'New Aspects of Thoreau', a study of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Falling Water' house, three pages about James E. Lovelock and Gaia, two on John Cage's 'Thoreau Mix', a piece on the concept of universality in civil disobedience (it seems to be about Martin Luther King and his concept of nature), an article linking Thoreau to the Beat Generation, an article about the Walden House and the Kit-Kit Dizze Houses (more log cabins in the woods), an article about Rachel Carson's book 'Silent Spring' (appearing in 1962, it's a piece of radical environmentalism which attacks the unsustainable practices of agribusiness), then an article about nature as it appears in children's books, 'The Genealogy of Nature Writing'.



Next it's 'Eliot Porter and Nature Photography', a piece about parks and shrines as 'forests in the city', a lovely piece about 'Thinking in the Woods' (forest cabins as places in which to 'get your head together', write poetry, etc), a nature book guide, a nature CD guide, then Studio Voice's regular round-up of fashion, art, film and music. Plus a special portfolio by Christine Rebet, the French artist whose Robin Hood show last year inspired the song of the same name on my forthcoming album. Robin Hood, a man for whom the forest is a symbol of justice, a corrective to the inequalities and evils of the city.

Many western style mags leave me cold with their brash, nasty, silly and selfish consumerism. Literary reviews recently have been all about the awfulness of the Bush regime or the Iraq war. More specialised magazines about visual culture and taste alienate me with snobby intellectualism which seems, ultimately, to be a matter of class distinction rather than a real interest in the subjects discussed (even favourites like The Wire and Frieze seemed a bit tedious this month). But Studio Voice just confirmed, once again, why it's my favourite magazine. I admire the thoroughness and research that goes into its theme issues, but above all I admire its love and positivity. In a humane and intelligent way, the magazine is showing a way forward, campaigning for values which are both ethical and aesthetic. There's a tender-minded utopianism here which is also a style, a way of being.

That phrase 'a way of being' was knocking around in my head the last couple of days in London as I tried to analyse why the city grates on me so much these days. I decided that it's London's 'way of being' which disturbs me, its 'habitus', its soul. London drags me down to a dark place of the soul; its way of being seems to me to be fundamentally wrong. Back in Berlin the air is fresher, people are quieter, slower and more serious, the buildings are more solid and the forest doesn't feel far away. Next week (and for the next two months) I'll be in Japan, a land of mountains, forests, cities and sea. Although many of this month's articles are about the forest in American culture, Studio Voice reminds me of how important the forest is to the Japanese too. Even for city-dwellers, the forest can be an important template, a part of our soul, our sensibility, our habitus. Perhaps all London needs is a corrective forest. Perhaps only forest – forest planted through all its streets, thick cone-thudding, car-banishing forest – could save the place.

Comments

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Shock tactics seem to be needed in some quarters.

But the larger point is, Japan is not an isolated self-sufficient entity and its existence relies on a vast and continuous stream of imported natural resources from other places. 'Ecological footprint' seems a helpful concept in fostering consideration of the inter-connectedness of economies, nations, human socities in different places.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, of course. I think Japan knows all about its interdependence with other Asian countries. I don't quite see how that relates to the Japanese having a distinct concept of nature, though.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

For starters, this (http://www.greenpeace.or.jp/campaign/forests/tasmania/slide3/slide_en_html?ph=s02) is just something that came up near the top in google when I typed "Japan Forest Destruction".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the Greenpeace activists fighting for Tasmanian forests in those photos are Japanese!

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course. In my early years in Japan I spent a considerable amount of time with such people, who were members not of the international Greenpeace but of various domestic Japan-based NGOs.

Such activists are fewer in number and much weaker in influence than in other wealthy countries. Overall activism in Japan tends to be a rather frustrating pastime. I can't really recommend it.

However, if this is a post on a Japanese magazine article about forests, I feel it is important to remark that Japanese companies do not have a very good record in the treatment of forests around the world.

I'd go so far as to suspect that the Studio Voice special issue (much as I enjoy browsing SV myself) is a kind of propaganda to the effect that all is OK, when it really isn't. I wonder whether that special issue mentions any of the political/economic/ecological issues surrounding the planet's threatened forests? Do they mention some of the Japanese companies who are the worst offenders? Or is it all hazy nature-myth bed-time stories?

Domestic forests are also contentious. Most Japanese forests are really tree-farmed monocultures. That's why they look groomed. If you actually go for a walk in those forests you may notice that they are, in fact, rather barren and don't support much bird or animal life. Tbere are very few old-growth (let alone primeval) forests left in Japan. If you are in Japan this spring, you may experience a dreaded (by allergy sufferers) expected surplus in sugi pollen.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This is just turning into a typical Marxy session! I think the fundamental problem is that cultural thinking and activist thinking are at odds. I would stop reading Studio Voice if it turned into the Greenpeace Gazette or Adbusters or the Utne Reader, worthy though those publications are.

It seems to me that you're trying to turn cultural issues into activist issues, and in so doing you're violating a certain kind of Japanese thinking (which is tender-minded and sentimental-philosophical-religious about nature) and trying to turn it into a certain kind of anti-corporate aggression which is, actually, typical of a certain kind of western mindset. I call it 'the talk radio mindset', but it's also a very familiar internet debating style, where you Google corporate dirt, hypocrisy etc and try to show that the poetic mindset is naive. Thing is, so far you've come up with a statistically very far-fetched theory about urban footprints (designed, as its authors admit, to shock), some photos of Japanese Greenpeace activism (which you then tell us is a minority activity in Japan) and some regurgitated Alex Kerr. Alas, Marxy isn't here to help you to Google more dirt on Japanese companies (perhaps even the company that owns Studio Voice, why not?) because he's launching his new album (made of plastic!) in New York. What lies behind all these statistics is the tired old 'doctrine of Japanese original sin', and I'm afraid it's one of my New Year's Resolutions not to get involved in theology this year.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Hmmm ...

That seems to be a rather extreme reading of my posts, but perhaps I've asked for it with that comment about "hazy nature-myth bedtime stories".

To start by answering the only part of your critique which offends me, I'm not really capable of regurgitating Alex Kerr's D&D because I haven't read it and refuse to do so on ethical grounds which I have already made clear.

No, my statements on Japan's sugi and hinoki mono-culture forests are based on first hand experience hiking many hundreds of kilometers in forests in various parts of Japan. They are also based on discussions with Japanese ecologists and environmentalists as are my statements about the overseas activities of some Japanese companies.

The sad fact of the matter is that while there is or was some kind of tradition of nature worship in Japan, Japan as a modern society treats natural environments like forests quite badly. Roughly speaking I put Japan somewhere between the USA and Europe as ecological offenders.

Yes I'd probably much rather browse Studio Voice than the Utne Reader or Adbusters. But maybe not for thir special issue on Forests. I guess the cognitive dissonance would probably be too much for me, actually having spent a considerable amount of time in Japanese forests.

I don't harbour any notion of "Japanese Original Sin" and I certainly don't go for any downright Japan bashing a la Marxy. Overall I'm a Japan suporter rather than a detractor. But the trouble is Momus, you sometimes go pretty far out on a limb in your promotion of rather tired 'myths of Japan'.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, this issue of Studio Voice, although it isn't billed as such, as actually an investigation of American attitudes to the forest, so Japanism or anti-Japanism is not really appropriate. It wouldn't be appropriate, either, for them to do investigative journalism into the foresting policies of Japanese companies. Studio Voice is an art, culture and style magazine, its concerns are primarily aesthetic. I may have been a little quick to bring in the idea that the attitude here as essentially a Japanese one, even if it's based on 19th century American books like 'Walden'. I was influenced, I think, by an interview I read in Idea magazine with designer Kenya Hara (http://www.idea-mag.com/cgi-bin/book/catalog.cgi?language=en&item=306), who talked about the Japaneseness of his design work then clarified that he wasn't trying to be 'Japonist' but to keep national flavours or essences in a world where everything threatens to be diluted to the point that it's all a grey mush.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think what I'm trying to say is that these debates turn all too often, at least over on Neomarxisme, into a kind of 'So where is the Japanese Michael Moore, eh? Eh?' As if Michael Moore were some sort of univerally valid principle, whereas a way of being, thinking, acting and living in the world as essentially Japanese as Moore's is American would be seen as inherently suspect.

But I appreciate that you're relativist about this and question your own culture as much as Japanese culture. I just wonder if even the way we frame these questions isn't also culturally determined. The pleasure I get from a Japanese magazine like Studio Voice is the familiar unfamiliarity of its concerns. I'm learning a Japanese way of seeing and framing and curating from it. It's a radically non-protestant way of seeing, and the Adbusters / talk radio sort of approach is just dragging (post)protestantism back into view. It's like a poet discovering a rich and crazy new voice and then being told he has to stick to political satire and protest songs.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

An interesting little factum that I stumbled on a few weeks ago while checking out that book on the shukanshi that Marxy was flogging, was that Thoreau did an early translation of the Lotus Sutra that was published in Emerson's magazine, "The Dial". Both are therefore revered by Soka Gakkai. The reason it came up is that the American co-author of the shukanshi expose had also written a book about Thoreau.

Side point, interesting in the current discussion in that I've noticed Japanese approaches to foreign culture often choose a topic where there is already some tradition or notable point of contact. A kind of a search for the Japanese self in the foreign.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Amidst gorgeous photos of woods and forests, lakes and mountains, Studio Voice continues with an article on the philosophers of the woods, Emerson, Thoreau, Muir and Leopold. The Japanese nature-love and Japanese thoroughness continues; there's an article on 'New Aspects of Thoreau', a study of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Falling Water' house, three pages about James E. Lovelock and Gaia, two on John Cage's 'Thoreau Mix', a piece on the concept of universality in civil disobedience (it seems to be about Martin Luther King and his concept of nature), an article linking Thoreau to the Beat Generation, an article about the Walden House and the Kit-Kit Dizze Houses (more log cabins in the woods), an article about Rachel Carson's book 'Silent Spring' (appearing in 1962, it's a piece of radical environmentalism which attacks the unsustainable practices of agribusiness), then an article about nature as it appears in children's books, 'The Genealogy of Nature Writing'.

This is interesting. Why does the discussion of activism seem to only include western activism? Is there any discussion of domestic activism in Japan. Any discussion of the eco-poetic traditions of Nanao Sakaki or Kenji Miyazawa? Or of grass-roots responses to industrial accidents like the Minamata incident? Do they cover any of the Japanese back-to-the-land movements of the 60's and 70's or the slow-life philosophy promoted by the Sloth Club from the 90's?

In other words I wonder if SV is romanticising the ecology movement by promoting it as something foreign? This would correspond nicely with your romanticisation of Japanese Nature worship.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I suspect romanticising is something that aesthetes do rather than Japanese specifically. I've been watching an anime by Okiyura Hiroyuki on Arte tonight, Jin-Roh, The Wolf Cell (http://www.arte-tv.com/fr/semaine/244,broadcastingNum=436037,day=5,week=1,year=2005.html), which is about a fictional Tokyo resistance movement operating in Shibuya in the 1950s, fighting fascist police. Actually, I didn't like it; its 'activism' seemed like a pretext to have a lot of gory action, bombs, machineguns and the like, which in turn is a pre-requisite of the Akira / Ghost in a Shell genre the film falls into.

Personally, I find gentleness and tender-mindedness extremely subversive.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, I'm still interested in making a league table of Japanese virtues and arranging matches between them all to see which wins. For instance:

TENDERMINDEDNESS v. HARMONY

NATURELOVE v. THOROUGHNESS

CONCRETENESS v. FANATICISM

PERVERSITY v. CONFORMITY

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

That last quote is one worth saving.

I suppose it's natural that activism would attract not only people who care about something but also those who are looking for a morally-justifiable excuse to enter conflict.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Being feisty and spoiling for a fight is what Michael Moore and the Neocons do have in common. It's adverbial, it's how you do things, not what you do. And the Japanese are very attuned to the adverbs, the etiquette. Adverbs are the most existential parts of speech. They're about our way of being. You can tell me what to do and I won't feel constricted. But if you tell me how to do it I will. (Same way this narrowing margin is making me feel.)