LOVING THE UNLOVABLE: MURAKAMI RYU'S 'FROM THE FATHERLAND WITH LOVE'

The visit by Japanese prime-minister Abe to Yasukuni Jinja in 2013 started a war of words with Korea and China before America and Israel chimed in…. Honouring war criminals apparently was not going to win Japan friends. On a visit to Maruzen book shop near Tokyo station meanwhile I found a book by Murakami Ryu entitled From the Fatherland with Love… He is, of course, the author of Coin Locker Babies not to mention the classic Blue Transparent Sky which won him the Akutagawa prize in the 1070s. Both of these books take a look at Japanese society in a way that is subversive and highly critical of the majority, a perspective he explores further in From the Fatherland with Love.

Set in 2010, in the face of an invasion by s small number of North Korean commandoes, Murakami lists the failures of the Japanese government which proves incapable of responding to the situation. To the surprise of the North Korean commandoes their plans work without exception. The Japanese government refuses to engage with them and instead blockades the whole island of Kyushu in order to protect the mainland from further threats of terrorism. The exception to this perception of Japanese weakness in the novel is provided by a small group of misfits; murderers and other unreformed characters who cannot fit into Japanese society, criminal or otherwise. They alone are untraceable and therefore untouchable which proves to be their greatest asset as they make plans to fight the North Koreans whose numbers have swelled by another five hundred after the first two days of their occupation of Fukuoka. The scene is further complicated by the announcement that they are another on hundred and twenty thousand troops ready to sail to Fukuoka as part of the ‘rebellion’ against the North Korean regime. As they make their way in a fleet of leaky boats the Japanese government is pressured by governments around the world to practice caution. As the North Koreans are ‘refugees’ they need to be given protection. The blockade which the Japanese government has put in place has meanwhile driven a wedge between the capital and the rest of the country.

Interestingly, whilst the Japanese are shown to be weak and indecisive, the North Koreans are shown to be more than just efficient. After a period of time it becomes apparent that they are quite brutal and entirely lacking in sympathy. Hence, the gang of misfits take it upon themselves to fight the koryo. As such Murakami shows that as individuals rather than mindless members of the majority it is possible to think and act against forces that are otherwise irresistible. He makes the point over and over again that the majority, whoever they are, whatever they appear to be like, enjoy privilege and power because of violence in one form or another. Prior to their coming to Japan, the North Koreans see the Japanese as monsters, people to be hated. These perceptions are challenged, however, as they become acclimatised to their new home. They encounter Japanese products such as cigarettes, quality paper, running hot water and pornography. Personal items such as women’s underwear prove to be not just a symbol of softness and corruption but also but also of comfort and a superior quality of life. It is noted that the Japanese were the first Asian nation that was able to wage war against the Western powers. The problem for the North Koreans is working out what happened next, and why they became so soft? The reality, of course, is that they are not immune to corruption and to make stand against it there is a public execution of two soldiers. In a scene that could have been dreamt up by Kurosawa Akira, a Japanese doctor who spent his early years in Manchuria, arrives before the assembled troops in his white doctor’s gown and white hair and has to be restrained so that they execution take place. The following day, as events in the novel move towards their climax and the destruction of the North Korean base by Murakami’s misfits, a North Korean female soldier visits the hospital and returns the shoe to the doctor that he had lost during his protest. Later it turns out that she survives and is adopted by Dr Seragi and plans to open the orphanage in Japan that she had once dreamt of opening in North Korea.

HOSODA MAMORU: WOLF CHILDREN

Wolf Children made in 2012 is the latest anime by Hosoda Mamoru. It comes after The Girl Who Leapt Through Time 2006 and Summer Wars 2009. At times, it is like watching the 1988 Miyazaki Hayao film, Tottoro. There are the scenes set in the country planting crops, watching plants grow and, of course, the great house cleaning scenes where an abandoned house in the country is brought back to life by refugees from the city. In Tottoro the mother is hospitalised so the father and his two children move to the country to be close to her. In Wolf Children the father is killed and so the mother moves with her children to the country. She has to do this as, like their father, her children are wolf children. They are able to transform themselves like werewolves but unlike most horror films, they have a choice as to whether they live a human life or an animal life. Like many films that focus on a point of difference these children (and their mother) see the way in which this point of difference becomes the basis for discrimination by human beings. The children have to hide their true identities, in order to survive. Being the object of an irrational fear puts them at great risk. Whilst Yuki chooses to go to school and be human her brother Ame struggles to find acceptance and chooses to drop out of school and receive his schooling from a fox in the mountains. One of the highlights in this film is the scene where Sugawara Bunta plays Yamashita, a crusty old villager who begrudgingly helps the young single mother to grow crops so that her family doesn't starve. His character doesn't change and whilst the mother is shown to struggle with the tasks that he sets her at least he shows her the way to survive whereas her children have no choice but to conform or be destroyed like their father.

Interviewed by Ryan Huff on a visit to Australia, in 2014, Hosoda was asked about the story he was trying to tell:

"When I started Wolf Children I wanted to outline parenthood, more specifically the point where the relationship starts and where it ends. For me, I believe that a parent's job is finished when their children become independent. The children then have an opportunity to use what they've learned. Unlike my previous films, where the story unfolds within three days, the passing of time in the story is stretched out over thirteen years. It was necessary to show everything that a parent does for their children. It's not very conventional in that way."

MOJO WORLD LIVE AT THE OZU CAFE IN CHIGASAKI

Riding the Shonan Shinjuku express from Shinjuku down to Chigasaki is a bit like having a death wish. Whilst not quite getting to shinkansen speeds it feels like it is trying its best. How on earth it would stop if it had to is hard to imagine. The trip takes about an hour and Chigasaki, like everywhere else in this part of Japan, is full of people. The difference is that it is by the beach and, according to Mojo World, people go surfing there before work when the waves are up. Mojo World met me at the station and then his friend Rie san picked us up and drove us to the Ozu café. The café had been open for three years and whilst it wasn't very big, liked to present live music to its diners. Mojo World specialises in music that he plays on various instruments that he has collected from around the wold. When I first met Mojo World he still liked to play Dock of the Bay and other R and B classics on an acoustic guitar. Quitting his job to go overseas he came back to Japan and began importing musical instruments from around the world. He plays as much live music as he can in the summer months and then records music in the winter months. Whilst setting up he decided that there would be two sets. Mojo World would play the first set himself and then after a short break the three of us would lay before he would finish the set accompanied by Rie san on percussion. Rie san had a variety of weapons in her percussion arsenal and had been playing since high school. By day, she said later, she was a life insurance saleswoman. With a small audience in the house, the owner turned off the reggae music on the sound system and then turned down the lights. Mojo World would take a different instrument for each song and build up several layers on a loop and then play over this. It was quite effective and for a passerby to just come in off the street it would have made quite an impression. Especially if they came in during the first song which was a rather unique interpretation of Silent Night which Mojo World had chosen because of it being Christmas season. Given the sounds that he was making, it was lucky that he had shaved off his big bushy beard so that he didn't look like a cult leader so much anymore. For the rest of the performance he didn't really sing so much when he used his voice as make sounds. After the performance a tambourine was passed around for donations and I had some cheese cake and a hot coffee. Then it was back to the station and the last train to Hashimoto before changing to the Keio line for Shinjuku. By this time of night there were no express trains, they were all local and were never in the slightest danger of coming off the rails. 

SUKITA MASAYOSHI EXHIBITION IN OSAKA

The Sukita Masayoshi exhibition was being held in the Big Step in Amerika Mura, downtown Osaka. It was early afternoon and, heading south from Umeda on the Midosuji line, it had been quieter than usual despite this being a public holiday for the Emperor’s birthday. I could still remember when the old emperor had been on his death bed in 1989, the news in Tokyo broadcast details about his vital signs every night until the end.

 

After eating o-mu Raisu for lunch at Meijiken, an old favourite in Shinsaibashi that had been there since the 1930s, we found our way to the entrance of the gallery and straight away I recalled several of the photographs that Sukita san had used in his book on David Bowie for the launch of which he visited Melbourne and the Silver K gallery in 2012. Particularly the shots of Bowie wearing the Yamamoto Yoji designed clothes. After looking at the extensive selection of photographs we sat in some comfortable chairs and watched some videos… There was a news special from New Zealand about the book launch for Sukita’s photographs of David Bowie, there was a video of AKB48, there was another music video and then some scenes for a counter-culture inspired film in the early 1970s, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets… Elsewhere in the exhibition there were photos of Western musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Iggy Pop and David Sylvian as well as bands such as the B 52s, Bow Wow and Devo. There were lots of Japanese musicians including photos from the Solid State Survivor sessions for the Yellow Magic Orchestra and some landscapes and an interesting shot of some PET bottles that were filled with some kind of eerie light. One photo taken in Nagasaki in the early 1960s showed a man with some horrendous scarring on his neck. The shot was very grainy but it didn’t disguise the extent of the burns. Presumably he was a victim of the atomic bomb.

 

Despite his father being killed during the war when he was a child, Sukita still remembers him taking photographs. As a child he had been obsessed with films from the West starring actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean and he sometimes rode his bicycle 100 kilometres to see these films. As a result, he became a photographer and later travelled to New York and London to photograph various musicians such as Jimmy Hendrix, Marc Bolan and David Bowie...

MACH PELICAN SUPPORTING GUITAR WOLF AT THE TOTE

    

 

It was a nice hot day in town and Christmas was on the horizon. Guitar Wolf had played during the week at the Espy and now it was going to be on for young and old at the Tote. The Spazzys walked on to stage and played to a crowd that was still in its infancy. They didn't seem to mind and in what turned out to be their second show for the day weren't going to be distracted even when the lights went off. "It's nice in the dark" said one.

"Can someone please shine a light" said another. "I need to see where the dots are on my guitar."

An obliging punter held up his mobile and shone a light so she could find her spot for the next song.

After a short break Mach Pelican made their way on to the stage. The singer/guitarist took his spot in front of the microphone and they were off racing through the next few songs.

 

"Atsu sick cunt" came a cry from the crowd.

 

There was some drama as the bass player's strap came undone and he had to make a few adjustments. One of the punters was staring to make himself known air punching his way from one side of the stage to the next. He climbed up face level with the singer and air punched a long to the music to the alarm of the roadies. After awhile it became apparent that he wasn't going to connect with the singer's face so there a was a lowering of the tension. Julian Wu stood next to him slumped over the fold back. It didn't look like he was going to indulge in the same kind of hysterics. At the end of the set a group of beared men started chanting over and over:

 

"Whoa Mach Pelican

Whoa Mach Pelican

Walking along

Singing a song..."

 

The air puncher turned and stared. After a few repetitions of the same verse, he started to chant along with them.

 

With what appeared to be great disdain, the bass player from Guitar Wolf walked on stage with his bass which only had three strings and  tuned up before, with a flick his hair, he  walked off the stage. The drummer in his Hawaii shirt set up, played a few beats on the drums and then followed. Like creatures from another planet they set the tone for what was to come next... If that was possible. A large number of big boys with beards and short pants were already staking their claim at the front of the stage. By the time Guitar Wolf joined Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf on stage the crowd was thick and the band took advantage of the build up and just played slabs of noise. The bass player paddling away on his three strings as the guitar showed what you can do with power chords and a fuzz box. To start the show he skulled a stubby full of beer. Once that was down the hatch he cleared his throat grinned at the crowd pointing at them with his fingers before taking aim with his guitar and subjecting them to a barrage of sonic fire.

 

"Have you been to Japan" Guitar Wolf screamed several times. "I bet you haven't been to Mars." With that off his chest the guitar was cranked up again, the crowd surged and the scene for Tokyo Trashville in all its glory was set. Air puncher made his way onto the stage a few times but when he started pawing at Guitar Wolf who was flat on his back on the stage the roadie threw him off to the delight of the crowd. One woman in the crowd had already slapped him a few times with his own snapback. An intense looking man with an Asian girlfriend suddenly walked off leaving her with a look of consternation on her face. Late he too was thrown off the stage, this time by the bass player. The disdain he had worn before the show had well and truly been left behind as the intensity of the show picked up.

 

"Do you know baseball?" asked Guitar Wolf. "I don't think so. I think you know cricket." With that he took off his guitar and hit a ball into the crowd. A bottle was thrown narrowly missing his guitar. Either he didn't notice or he didn't care. Guitar Wolf unfazed, sent ball after ball into the crowd before strapping on his guitar again and hitting the fuzz box.

 

The big boys in short pants were taking it in turns to stage dive by now and there was plenty of crowd surfing going on. A Japanese woman with some impressive tattoos joined the Aussie boys before Guitar Wolf himself got in on the action. One of th4e crowd surfers tried to take his guitar and was then given it. Guitar Wolf sang the word Driver over and over pointing and prodding the punter when to play the guitar. he put his arms around him a few times and said something into his ears. Whatever it was the punter still looked confused. He looked to the bass player to get some idea of where to play on the frets. Guitar Wolf started to wrestle him to the ground. At some he must have injured himself because his hand was covered in blood. The roadie looked in in confusion. A young woman dressed in a big KISS t-shirt climbed up next to the speakers to take photos. By the end of the show the crowd were surging to and from the stage. There was lots of fist pumping and photo action happening. After the set there was a short encore and then it was all over for Guitar Wolf for the night. The punters looked shocked if not delirious.   

'WAR IS OVER!': YOKO ONO AT THE M.C.A., SYDNEY

Flying into Sydney the winds were a bit rough and the plane bounced around quite a bit. I had a few white knuckle moments as I braced myself and practiced some breathing exercises. Once we had landed it was off to Circular Quay and the Museum of Contemporary Art to see the Yoko Ono retrospective. I had no idea what to expect but I was interested, very interested.

Inside the first thing on display was a screening of the 1965 film Cut Piece of which I had only ever seen stills in books. It was fascinating to watch as people came up to the artist to cut away her clothing… The whole idea of what an artist is and how art is produced was explored on camera in what appeared to be trying circumstances for the ‘artist’. Next was the chess board on which all the pieces were white so that the game was played by people in a way where colour was not allowed to separate or divide them. In a room to the side was the ‘Family Album’ collection which contained a pair of John Lennon’s glasses covered in blood. Next was the giant magnet towards which the contents of an entire room were being drawn. One of the strongest messages of the exhibition is the participatory nature of Yoko Ono’s art and therefore the importance of collaboration. Visitors are constantly encouraged to participate. There is a phone inside a maze which Yoko Ono calls each day… There are the helmets from the Vietnam War suspended from the ceiling, inside which are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of the sky… Visitors are encouraged to take one and so the visitor is challenged to feel that they are not touching something or stealing it (Though this interestingly wasn’t the message that seemed to be conveyed in her film).

 

Towards the exits was a room with another screen and there were hundreds of posters of her work and exhibitions on the walls. There various books that she had published over the yeas (including Grapefruit) and her music on some tablets with headphones.  I listened to part of I Am a Witch which was already five years old. The tracks had been remixed and jazzed up for the new millennium. Cat Powers was one of the artists she had collaborated with on this project. For Yoko Ono, the artist, the exhibition brought together all of the work that she had done over many years both before and after John Lennon and the impression was very powerful. This woman had been exploring these ideas for a very long time. And the message was validated and made more powerful with the passage of time which is pretty impressive given how weird and way out these ideas had seemed in their heyday. In the end, it wasn’t Yoko Ono that needed to change but the world around, not unlike Aung San Suu Kyi. Ultimately the message is that we are all artists. No ivory towers here… Rapunzel has left the building.

 

Outside the ferries were going to and from the wharves while the tourists were surrounded by seagulls looking for a feed. Some indigenous performers entertained a large crowd while a couple paraded the dog in a pink tutu. Getting off at central station, a woman and a man were arguing outside. Things came to a head when he suddenly took off from under a torrent of expletives after which the woman gave chase, pelting him with food. 

 

 

SPOTLIGHT ON SUGAWARA BUNTA AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN JAPAN

 

 

When I first went to Japan in the 1980s, a family I stayed with in Gunma prefecture had a lively dog that they called Bunta or Bunchan for short. I saw told that he was named after the actor Sugawara Bunta. This actor was of the old school and, like Takukura Ken, starred in lots of yakuza movies. Between 1975 - 1979 he also made a number of trucker movies in the Torakku Yaro series. In more recent years, he has worked as a voice actor for the Ghibli studios (playing Kamaji in Spirited Away) and even starred with Shinohara Tomoe in the TV drama series Sensei Shirani No. More recently he was the inspiration for the character Admiral Akainu in the 2012 One Piece movie 'Z'.

 

I had the good fortune on one trip back to Japan of finding a CD of the soundtracks to a number of the Torakku Yaro films... Not that my wife sharted my enthusiasm. To her, it probably reeks of enka or some other form of sake induced nostalgia for the 'good old days'. In my mind the Torakku Yaro films are up there with some of my other favourites like Bee Bop High School and the Wolf and Cub series.

Finally, of great interest to me (again), was the appearance of Sugawara Bunta on the NHK news in November 2013. The Abe government is apparently considering reforms that aims to restrict freedom of speech. Sugawara Bunta was interviewed after attending some kind of a protest meeting and he said that given the lack of freedom of speech under the occupation after the war he found it incomprehensible that the Japanese government now considered introducing these same laws on themselves as a democracy.

NUIGURUMI VERSUS HELLO KITTY

The Hello Kitty phenomenon in Japan is well documented. The Sanrio company hit the jackpot with this kawaii or cute character first seen in Japan in 1974 and in America in 1976. Its success with not only children but also young Japanese women has led to speculation that its sucess is indicative of the infanitilisation of Japanese society. Kawaii or cute culture has been blamed for creating a selfish generation of young Japanese women (and men) who refuse to take their responsibilities to their familes and community seriously. By refusing to marry and have children they are somehow not 'Japanese'. And yet others argue that Hello Kitty and cute culture more generally has helped empower women in Japan so that they can confidently seek self-fulfilment rather than social approval based on self-sacrifice. There is no doubt that in Japan today, young women are taking more control over their own lives and making decisions that reflect their own interests and desires rather than the interests and desires of others. Hello Kitty and cute culture in general, rather than Western feminism, seems to be largely responsible for this. The latest wave of kawaii culture can be seen in the youtube vidoes of Harajuku pop princess Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Kyary is the latest in a long line of kawaii pop princesses that includes Hamazaki Ayumi, Amuro Namie and in the slightly more distant past Puffy and the gya gya girl, Shinohara Tomoe... These women are, of course, representative of the street culture celebrated in the 2005 song 'Harajuku Girls' by Gwen Stefani which Japanese politicians seem to fear the most when they speculate on the reasons for the plummeting birth rate. In 2007 Japan's Health minister Yanagisawa Hakuo told Liberal Democratic Party members that women of child bearing age should perform a 'public service' and raise the birth rate which fell to a record low of 1.26 children per woman in 2005. In his speech, Yanagisawa referred to women as 'birth-giving machines'. 

Which brings me to the article above. In this article from a Tokyo newspaper that a friend, Shigemi san in Inagsahi shi, recently posted to her facebook page, Japanese women appear to be not alone in their obsession with kawaii or cute culture. In this article, a man appears to have appropiated the teddy bear that his wife bought and made it the centre of his attention. His wife is, not surprisingly angry at being supplanted by this non-human rival for her husband's affections. In some ways it is like the short story 'Mado no Soto' by Yoshimoto Banana (from the collection Nambei to Furin) in which a teddy bear helps a child come to terms with the death of a beloved grandmother. In the story, the narrator recalls something 'strange' that happened when she was seven years old. Her grandmother was criticially ill and she spent the night alone while her parents were at the hospital. When she awoke at dawn she saw that the teddy bear that her grandmother had given her was not in the bed. She looked around and saw it sitting with its face pressed against the window. Looking at the dawn together, she realised that despite her childish notions that 'life is forever' her grandmother would die as would her parents and ultimately she herself. In this story, Yoshimoto, herself a product of kawaii culture and Japanese anime and manga, subverts the conventions of 'serious' literature by infusing the world of childhood with a significance that others argue is symptomatic of the infantilisation of Japanese society. In this evolving Japanese society, maybe the husband in the article above believes that the nuigurumi (teddy bear) can communicate with him. If so hopefully it can bring him and his wife together!!! (Below is a picture of Shimizu Yuko in 2010, the creator of Hello Kitty).

 

 

 

'KU KIKAN' AT OFF THE KERB

Off the Kerb is a small gallery on Johnstone Street in Collingwood, opposite the Tote and next door to a Singapore noodle shop... Sally took Grimshaw to see an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art. Six artists from Kanazawa from Japan exploring the atmosphere of a space. Walking in off the street the gallery featured some works taped to pieces of cardboard arranged on the floor. Seals had been applied to the painted images... In translation they were listed as 'stickers'. On the second floor, Grimshaw climbed a ladder and in the household shrine mounted to the ceiling was a mirror on either side of which were two small video screens one of which showed Astro Boy and the other, footage from the tsunami that caused the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant. A separate installation featured a dozen or so small screens suspended from the ceiling in a circle. The viewer was invited to stand inside the circle to watch a sleeping woman roll over in and out of the camera frame. It was a little like being inside a goldfish bowl... Gasping for air, Grimshaw went back downstairs and noticed the small plant growing between some cracks in the floor boards. In one of the rooms there were several more installations and some pictures of a building. Looking closer, Grimshaw realised he was looking at some besser blocks. Amazing what catches the eye, he decided. Outside it was raining and all the talk was about the big match between hawthorn and Geelong.

'PLAYING STATUES' AT CAKE WINES POP-UP

Deep in Fitzroy off a side street and down a lane there is a space called Cake Wines Pop-Up... A small space in which three even smaller spaces are separated by curtains... In the central area a number of tables are set out for drinks and to either side are the spaces devoted to exhibitions and performances... 'Playing Statues' was a small exhibition that had drawn an even smaller crowd who held on to their wine glasses and closed in on the pictures. The pictures were comprised of tiny detail upon tiny detail of temples and buildings and figures representative of traditional Japanese culture. Sean Edward Whelan, the artist, had incorporated these into figures, the statutes of the title, that were in conflict with various pieces of equipment associated with playgrounds and theme parks that symbolised modern Japan. Based in Niigata, Whelan no doubt had been exposed to the ugliness of over development. It was a nation-wide phenomena that had preoccupied the best minds of a generation such as Miyazaki Hayao. His animated film 'Spirited Away' explored the same  contested space in which modernity fought against tradition. In the case of Sean Edward Whelan, the battle is contained to a few frames on display in Kerr Street at the tiny gallery in Cake Wines Pop Up. The gallery, tucked away down a laneway, is a perfect location given the number of pictures on display. To some extent an esoteric display, it probably represented more of a playful nod in the direction of dystopic fantasy rather than the full blown surreal assault on the senses that a disciple of performance artist Mori Mariko might have attempted. It was even less of a nod in the direction of Yoshitomo Nara or Murakami Takashi who had dramatised the lives of little girls with bandaged limbs and mutant plants respectively. The walk back home up Brunswick Street past Naked for Satan, Mary's House of Welcome and the Uptown Jazz Club was all that it promised to be. A diverse range of venues catering for a diverse range of people. Mary's House of Welcome apologised for the early closure  during the day but promised to be open in the morning for breakfast as usual.     

ITAMI JUZO VERSUS BEAT TAKESHI

The Japanese film industry has always been strong. The late 1980s saw the emergence of Itami Juzo, a major talent in a film industry that boasted the likes of Ozu and Kurosawa Akira, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei, Ichikawa Kon and  Mizoguchi Ken, (not to forget Teshigahara Hiroshi). It was an industry that had produced classics like Rashomon, Kwaidan, Tokyo Story, Woman of the Dunes and Pigs and Battleships. Then, of course, there are the anime (animated films), but that is another story.  The satirical films of Itami Juzo made lots of people laugh but they also took a savage swipe at the excesses of Japanese society, particularly during the 'bubble economy' period of the 1980s..  After The Funeral (1984) and then Tampopo, Itami made A Taxing Woman in 1988 starring his wife Miyamoto Nobuko. This was a major success. With success came more scrutiny, however, and given the nature of some of the targets of his satire, it was perhaps no surprise when he was attacked by the yakuza and hospitalised after making Minbo no Onna, an anti-yakuza film in 1992.

Whilst Itami Juzo blazed the self-righteous trail of the independent film-maker, a challenger appeared in the opposite corner from an unlikely source. Whilst Itami Juzo targeted the excesses of the yakuza and religious cults, Beat Takeshi's comic, tough guy films, celebrated the dignity of the yakuza with his back to the wall, a long established tradition in Japanese film (see the films of Suzuki Seijun). Kitano Takeshi restored their honour. At the time, however, many Japanese would have found Kitano Takeshi's emergence as a serious film maker hard to accept after his years of making lowbrow comedy as Beat Takeshi on Japanese television. These were madcap television programs aimed at the lowest common denominator. To emerge as a serious film maker working with respected professionals like the film score writer Hisaisha Joe was an unlikely achievement, especially when it culminated in the making of Hanabi in 1997, which received the Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival. That put him up there with the likes of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

This was great news for Kitano Takeshi and the Japanese film industry but a humiliation for Itami Juzo. This was the award that Kurosawa, his film Rashomon and the postwar Japanese film industry on the map. Itami Juzo had been eclipsed by a man who glorified the yakuza and had made a career out of low brow game shows on Japanese television. Subsequently, after  a murky sex scandal, Itami Juzo allegedly committed suicide by jumping off a Tokyo building in 1997. There was, however, rumours of yakuza involvement in his death due to talk about Itami planning to make a second anti-yakuza film. One of his last acts was to laud his wife, Miyamoto Nobuko, as one of Japan's greatest actresses.

MURAKAMI HARUKI: 'DANCE DANCE DANCE', A SEQUEL TO THE RAT TRILOGY

Dance, Dance, Dance, revisits the RAT trilogy and has the narrator search for Kiki, the woman with the beautiful ears, who he last saw in the Dolphin Hotel in Hokkaido. It was "her purpose" he explians to lead him to the hotel which she he describes as a "biological dead-end" (3). Apart from Kiki's disappearance, the Rat we discover has, in fact, died and been transformed into the Sheep Man. He took his life in Hokkaido after he had been possessed by the sheep, a malevolent spirit that takes control of those it possess in order to gain power. About the Sheep Man the narrator asks, “Why is he around? I don’t know. Maybe I needed him. Maybe because as you get older, things fall apart, so something needs to hold things together. Put the brakes a little on entropy, you know…” (Dance, Dance, Dance, 194).

There is a sense of fatalism at work in the novel as the narrator says early on, "The story's already decided" (6). The idea that he has a lack of control over his own life is underlined when the narrator compares his life to a computer game which recalls the second book of the trilogy Pinball 1973: “I hardly had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death” (Dance, Dance, Dance, 210). This idea finds its ultimate expression in the concept of the switchboard which the Rat uses to explain how it is his job to keep the various parts of the narrators life connected through the switchboard. Finally, it is Kiki who explains to him that everything that exists in the parallel world in the old Dolphin Hotel is part of him.

Materialism and mindless greed are increasingly Murakami’s targets in this pre-Kobe earthquake and pre-Aum Sarin gas attack sequence of novels. If he is ambivalent about the student protests of the 1960s, he is unimpressed by the bubble economy of the 1980s. The protagonist notes in Dance, Dance Dance, “Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshipping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.” The narrator reflects that things were simpler in 1969 (55).

Whilst materialism and greed are a concern in the novel, the narrator has to try to connect the various parts of his life which have come undown starting with Kiki. He is also unable to cry for what he has lost but he hears someone crying for him. Significantly he asks "Why would anyone want to cry for me?" (5). Sick of "shovelling cultural snow" for a living, the narrator goes to Hokkaido. He discovers the old Dolphin Hotel has disappeared and been replaced by a huge concrete, steel and glass tower. He meets a receptionist with an unusual name, Yumiyoshi, who has had a strange experience on an uninhabited floor in the hotel that ordinarily doesn't exist. It scared her badly. There was no light, no sound and the air was moldy (43). When she told her manager he told her to tell no-one. The narrator eventually finds this mysterious place and is reacquainted with the Rat. The Rat explains that this place is the knot, it is tied to everything, the things that you lost and the things that you are going to lose (83). The narrator has been worried for some time, however, that he will never get back to the "real world". Having met Yumiyoshi is a significant experience and he says, "I was jealous of the real world and her swim club" (77). In the meantime, however, he had seen a thirteen year old girl, Yuki, in a bar with her mother. When Yuki smiled at him, the narrator says, "I felt as if I had been chosen" (33). Later when she is abandoned by her mother, Yumiyoshi asks the narrator to accompany Yuki on his way back to Tokyo. The narrator is caught in a series of events whose significance are not yet clear.Yuki, it turns out, is also aware of the existance of the Sheep man. The only advice that the Rat has been able to give the narrator in the meantime is to keep dancing.

The narrator needless to say, forms a deep connection with Yuki and as the various elements in his life continue to unravel she is able to help him with crucial insights. When he reconnects with Gotanda, an old friend form junior high school who has become a well known actor, he spends the night with Mei, a high class prostitute. It is Mei who explains to the narrator that her name, like that of Kiki, has no reality, "These names don't have real lives. We're all image, signs tacked up on empty air" (156). When her dead body is found the narrator is picked up for questioning by the police but is released after he refuses to make an admission that he knew the dead girl. He is covering for his friend, Gotanda. It is Yuki with whom he dicusses these events. Watching her the narrator says, "She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all" (208).  When the narrator swaps cars and picks Yuki up in Gotanda's Maserati, she feels sick. It is Yuki who suggests that, "Maybe death's your connection to the world" (275).

The narrator sees Kiki again in his dreams and is taken to a room where there are six skeletons. He wonders who they are? Downstairs he finds a telephone number written on a piece of paper. After the deaths of the Rat and Mei comes the death of Dick North whom the narrator had met with Yuki in Hawaii. Later, when they watch Gotanda's movie together, Yuki feels sick again when she sees the scene where Gotanda has sex with Kiki. Yuki explains that Gotanda killed Kiki and put the body in the car which is why she felt sick. The narrator reassures that this isn't what happens in the movie but Yuki is adamant that that is what she felt. When the narrator suddenly asks Gotanada about this Gotanda himself is unsure, he feels that he did kill Kiki and it is because of a gap between his real self and a shadow self. He has commited many destructive acts since childhood because of this sense of unreality. His body is recovered from Tokyo Bay next morning after he drove the Maserati into the bay. Most of the skeletons that the narrator was shown in his dream are slowly being accounted for. The narrator says, however, that Gotanda's death, "lay me down in a lead-lined box of despair" (361).

The narrator flies back to Hokkaido to see Yumiyoshi. They make love and the narrator is reassured that he has rediscovered reality. All he has to do is "recover the know to to be connected" (386). He has a dream and revisists the Sheep man but the room on the non-existant floor is empty. Despite telling Yumiyoshi not to let go of his hand she does and he watches as she disappears into a wall. He is scared that he has lost her and follows her. When he wakes, she is sitting on the sofa watching him. Undressing, she rejoins him in bed where they make love and he says, "She was warm and smooth, with the weight of someone real... Yumiyoshi was soft as the ticking of time, her breath leaving a warm, damp spot on my ar. Reality" (292-3). During the novel, as the narrator discovers who each of the skeletons represents, he is filled with a sense of dread. Kiki explains, however, that the room and skeletons inside it were all part of him. Ultimately, the narrator is able to make his way out of the labyrinth of his own mind and find himself again in the real world.

'ABENOMICS': NEWS FROM TOKYO POST-FUKUSHIMA

Greetings from Tokyo,

                                     January -- should be quite a bit colder and drier by then! We've just slammed, literally overnight, into the rainy season, so the heat and humidity are still taking some getting used to. About two weeks ago we will still enjoying drier, sunny days which were quite pleasant and kept me in the pink (skin).

 

Anyway, Fukushima has influenced some changes, but they're not major for most people in Tokyo, so life seems to go on as it did before. Most of the nuclear reactors are mothballed, so electricity costs are subject to the relative strength of the yen, because utility companies are burning imported carbons. As a result, offices tend to keep the air-conditioning higher in summer (26 or 27 degrees) and lower in winter (20 or 21 degrees) in an effort to control overheads.

 

This also affects the time that people go home -- most people I talk to leave the office before 7:00 pm, and the trains seem more crowded between 5:30 and 7:00. Again, companies want to avoid burning the midnight oil!

 

The other direct impact is that produce from Fukushima is cheaper than produce from anywhere else. Some people seem wary of buying vegetables from the area, and this seems to be influencing prices. Personally, I tend to be much more careful about how much fish we consume, and tend to look for imported fish. So I think there is a bit of paranoia about radiation (at least in my brain).

 

The biggest changes, though, are from "Abenomics". A whole lot of money flooded into the Japanese economy but none knows exactly where it went! It seems to have gone in search of high-yielding investments, driving up the Nikkei like pressure drives up a bubble, and offshore. The weakened yen encouraged a lot of companies to repatriate funds, and exporting companies were able to book "exchange rate profits". But Japanese inflation seems to be price-driven (the bad type), rather than demand-driven (the good type). A simple chain is that a weak yen means that petrol costs more, and all stakeholders transfer the increased cost to the end-consumer. However, companies will not increase wages, so there is a risk of stagflation -- inflation but no economic growth.

 

Graeme

MURAKAMI HARUKI: THE RAT TRILOGY PART TWO

Wild Sheep Chase (1982) is the final part of the Rat trilogy that features the frequent customer of a small bar nicknamed Rat and the narrator known only as Watashi (I). This is an example of hard-boiled detective fiction influenced by Raymond Chandler but set in Japan. At the start of the novel, the narrator reminisces about university... These are the days he spent drinking and socialising. He reflects about a girl he knew who wanted to die. She slept with anyone but feels shut out when she has sex with the narrator. This is a significant observation as it is a theme that runs throughout Murakami's writing, the detachment of his characters who are eventually confronted by their lack of wamth and feelings. Murakami is very specific with detail: He describes exactly what the narrator eats, how he cooks his food, what he wears and what music he listens to. The reader isn't just given a time frame for the novel, the reader is given the exact time, July 24, 6.30 am (page 14). Given this attention to detail, the reader's senses are heightened. When the narrator's divorce is mentioned (page 17) it is no surprise given the fact that the girl he slept with at university felt 'shut out'... There is a sense of foreboding established within the first two chapters as the narrator recounts the death by suicide of the girl he slept with at university and then his divorce. Typically his wife didn't want to leave him, but she she felt like she was going nowhere with him. The narrator observes, "We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end" (21).

 

This sense of foreboding isd maintained at the aquarium where the narrator is struck by a whale's penis... He notes that "In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn" (26). He has a new girlfriend with three jobs (27). He sees her ears in an advertisement and has the photographs enlarged and taped to the wall of his apartment (29) Like the whale's penis they have been separated or are removed from their natural context and are given a surreal significance that is disorienting. The narrator himself has survived a number of disorienting experiences, the suicide of the girl he slept with at university and then his divorce. The detail provided by the clothes he wears, the food he eats and the music he listens to is important because it stops him from disappearing. It is significant that after his divorce he often conjures up the memory of his wife's slip on the back a chair. Her absence is defined by this slip. It is no surprise that he feels a sense of helplessness, "like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in" (29). His girlfriend tells the narrator that he is only half living (40). He wonders, "Had somebody else been living my life all the time? (41). The vaccum or hollow nature of the narrator is threatening to overcome the narrator but he is unable to resd the signs. It is his girlfriend who senses that an important phone call is coming... All she knows is that is has something to do with a sheep.

The 'wild adventure' she anticipates beging when the narrator meets a strange man with a tan that "could only have been the result of some unknown sun shining in some skies" (52). There are clues aplenty that the world with which the narrator has failed to engage is disappearing. And it is being replaced by the 'worm universe' at the centre of which is the sheep. It is the sheep that draws the narrator to the boss, a major right wing figure who, he learns, is in a coma. The boss has had a brain hemorrhage... And the key to finding a successor is the sheep. The narrator is the only person who can provide a clue to the whereabouts of the sheep. He used a photograph taken by his friend by the Rat for an advertisement. It turns out that the sheep that everyone is looking for is in the photograph. The only problem is that they have to find out where the phjotograph was taken. And the narrator hasn't heard from his friend for some time. In a rare letter from the Rat the narrator had previsouly learned that he was heading north, "I've come to where I was meant to come" (80). It might as well,  he says of the landscape "be the end of the world" (81). In relation to the photograph, the Rat asks that the narrator publish it where it can be seen. The photograph is important to the Rat although he says mysteriously "I can't tell you the reason why, though" (83).

The narrative concerning the narator's visit to the boss' right hand man is interspersed with a description of the Rat's letters and a trip back to the narrator's hometown after a four year absence. He is there to see J, the Chinese barkeeper, and to say farewell to the Rat's girlfriend. J expresses his discontent with the development in the twon. "They bulldoze the hills to put up houses, haul the dirt to the sea for landfill, then go and build there too. And they think it's all proper and fine" (88). The narrator goes for a walk to his favourite spot on the river. He observes that "The town belonged to the river from the very beginning, and it would always be that way" (91). But he also observes that all that was left of his favourite spot was fifty yards of oceanfront, "Fifty yards of of honest-to-goodness shoreline. If you overlooked the fact that it was hemmed in by thirty-foot high concrete walls" (91). Of the view he says, "Instead of ocean, a vast expanse of reclaimed land and housing developments  met my eyes. Faceless blocks of apartments, the miserable foundations of an attempt to build a neighbourhood" (92). The narrator's outrage can be described as a "distant voice like an echo from the bottom of a well" (95). This image which takes on extra significance in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, is repeated. Elsewhere Murakami refers to a "pebble plunging down fathomless wells" (108).

The visit to the boss' right hand man sees the narrator go off on a wild sheep chase to Hokkaido in search of the chestnut coloured sheep with the star on its back. The significance of the sheep is explained by the boss' hallucinatory dreams. The boss, it appears, was possesed by th spirit of the sheep while he was in Manchuria during the 1930. Upon returning to Japan he was arrested by the American military but after a period of time was released back into the community. As a result of his hallucinatory dreams he was able to build up a "tremendously sophisticated organisation" (118). The only ones to know the facts are the U.S. military who had kept him under observation at the time and the boss himself. The boss' right-hand man tells the narrator that it is impertaive that they find the sheep as "When the king dies, the kingdom crumbles" (118). The boss' right-hand man then expounds upon his theory of the mediocrity of the '60s generation that attempted an "expansion of cosciousness" but lacked will. It is will that the boss provides that has enabled the organisation to create a "magnificent palace" which isn now threatened by the propect of the wholf of the country being turned into a "public housing complex" (119). Ironically he dreads the same "uniform rows of public housing" and a Japan "leveled of mountians, coastlines or lakes" (119) like the narrator. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen they must find the sheep.

At first the narrator isn't convinced that it is worth his while to travel to Hokkaido in search of the sheep. He tells his girlfriend that it is impossible to find one sheep among hundreds of thousands. She corrects him and tells him that there are, in fact, only five thousand sheep in Hokkaido. She has done some research in the library and reassures him that the task is not impossoible. The narrator feels resnetful, however, about being "ordered and threatened and pushed around" (135). She convinces him to go by suggesting that the Rat may be "up to his neck in trouble?" Tying her hair back and showing him her ears, which he can't resist, they go to bed. His girlfriend asks him later if it has been a long ten years and he says "Along long time. Practically endless" (142). The narrator feels "truly alive" when he makes love to his girlfriend on the sofa. Significantly when she smiles he feels that it is a smile that he had seen before but couldn't remember where or when, He notes that "Women with their clothes off have a frightening similarity." She reassures him and says that when they go and look for the sheep "things'll fall into place" (143). Both the Rat and the narrator's girlfriend guide the narrator to compkete a mission for which he has little inclination or understanding. He is in a sense a less evolved being than them despite his obvious sense and sensibility. Significantly, the narrator refers to  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and quotes the opening sentence "My colleague Watson is limited in his thinking to rather narrow confines, but possesses the utmost tenacity." Of this sentence the narrator says, "Not bad for a lead-in sentence" (144). The reality is, of course, that the narrator is revealing his own limitations through the use of this quotation. When his girlfriend leaves eventually leaves him in Junitaki, there is a sense of inevitability despite his sense of bewilderment. This is how the narrow confines of his own thinking are revealed. He senses that she exists outside of time but he has no idea how she functions in his life, both providing him with the information he needs and the guidance he needs in order to help his friend and bring the trilogy to a conclusion.

It is his girlfriend who chooses the Dolphin Hotel saying she had "already got an image of a place." When they arrived there it was not 'Particularly old; still it was strikingly rundown" (163). Despite the narrator telling her that they could have stayed in a better hotel with all the money they have been given, she says "It's not a question of money. Our sheep hunt begins here. No argument, it had to be here" (166). Her awareness of the task on hand is on another level to that of the narrator who seems only concerned about his own comfort and how to spend the money that they have been given. They spend their first few days looking for a clue that may help them in their search for the sheep. After a while the narrator discovers from the clerk at the Dolphin Hotel that the hotel used to be the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. Furthermore the clerk is able to show them a photograph on the walls that shows the same scenery as in the photograph taken by the Rat. The narrator observes "Just great... Allt his time we've been passing right under this photograph." His girlfriend blurts out "That's why I told you it had to be at the Dolphin Hotel" (178). The narrator hasn't quite come to grips yet with the nature of the task that he has been given. In order to help them locate the scenery in the photograph, the clerk sends them upstairs to meet his father, the sheep professor.

The clerk recounts his father, the sheep professor's life story. After an excellent academic career he went to Korea toconduct resarch into rice cultivation. After that he was sent to Manchuria to develop a self-sufficiency program based on sheep. Here he disappeared for several days. After claiming that he had had a special relationships with a sheep he was sent back to Tokyo in disgrace. Having been pruged from his elite post he was abandoned by the sheep that had possessed him. Eventually  he became the director of the Hokkaido Ovine Association before opening the Dolphin Hotel. The sheep professor has no interest in talking to the narrator until he is shown thre cigarette lighter with the image of the sheep engraved upon it. The professor then describes his life since he was abandoned by thre sheep. "It's hell. A maze of a subterranean hell... That's been my life for fourty-two years" (186). The sheep he says came back to japan with him with a "monumental plan to to transform humanity and the human world" (189). The sheep professor says that before the narrator another young man had been to the hotel asking about the photograph. That of course was the Rat. After telling his story the sheep professor tells the narrator where to find the location in the photograph.

The narrator's journey takes him and his girlfriend to the town of Junitaki established by an Ainu youth and eighteen dirt farmers in the nineteenth century. The site for the village was chosen because of its inacessability. The dirt farmers didn't want to be found. The narrator upon his arrival in the village describes it as a "singularly dull town" (210). Having discovered from one of the the locals where the sheep farm was located, the narrator is annoyed with himself for forgetting that the Rat's father had a vacation villa in Hokkaido. He says of himself, "I always remember important details long afterward" (224). The caretaker agrees to give them a lift to the villa in his car but warned them that the road might be unpassable and they may need to walk part of the way, which is what they have to do. The narrator says "We were totally alone. As if we'd been dropped off at the edge of thew world" (233). They arrive at the villa and find that it is empty. There is no sign of the Rat. The narrator asks his girlfriend if her ears are telling her anything but she says she can't open them because she will get a headache.  They decide to wait for the Rat. The narrator goes to sleep on the sofa and when he awakes he knows that his girlfriend has gone. He fills his time waiting for the Rat to come by continuing to read Sherlock Holmes.

Of course the Rat doesn't come, or rather when he does come he is not the same old Rat that the narrator is expecting. It is the sheep man who at two o'clock announcing his arrival with three knocks on the door. They share a drink and the sheep man tells the narrator that he gave his girlfriend a lift out of the valley. She went back to the Dolphin Hotel. The sheepman tells the narrator off for confusing his girlfriend. He says "All you think about is yourself" (252). The sheep man tells the narrator that she "wasn't meant to come here." Finally he tells the narrator "You'll never see that woman again... Because you only thought about yourself" (253). The narrator tells the sheep man that he is waiting for hisa friend but thr sheep man seems uninterested. he says he will be back in a few days.

 After several days waiting the narrator sees the newspaper clipping in the living room which had advertised thre fact that he was looking for the Rat and he realises that the Rat knows he is looking for him. This raises a whole lot of questions and he comes to the realisation tat the rat doesn't want to face him. Yet he wasn't rejecting him either. he suspects that the sheep man knows something. The narrator goes out for a walk and has a second encounter with the sheep man. Back at the villa he reads a book about pan-Asianists and discovers that the right wing boss had grown up in a poor farming community in Hokkaido which was, of course, Junitaki. The narrator realises the boss would know that h would eventually discover this and he wonders if he is to be a pawn why he wasn't told in the first place? He realises that "At every turn, I'd been way off base, way off the mark" (266). With the arrival of the snow comes the narrator's third encounter witht erh sheep man. he expresses anger thatb his friend ahsn't come to see him and thre sheep man is unnerved. Looking into a mirror the narrator notices that there was no reflection of the sheep man in the mirror. "In the mirror world" observes the narrator, "I was alone. Terror shot through my spine" (272).  In the darkness the narrator reflects on time and decided to let time carry him to "where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns" (275). It is at this point that the Rat arrives.

The Rat tells the narrator about his suicide and how it was the only way to kill the sheep. He had been drawn up to the farm by the story of the sheep with the star on its back. Once he had been possessed he says that he had no choice, but to kill himself. "If I had waited, the sheep would have contrrolled me absolutely. It was my last chance" (281). One last thing remains to be done, however. This is why the rat lured the narrator to the farm. The Rat had been chosen by the sheep to create a "realm of total conceptual anarchy. A scheme in which all opposites would be resolved into unity. With me and the sheep at the centre" (284). The Rat, however, for reasons unknown to himself was not convinced. In the morning on the Rat's instructions the narrator connects some wires and winds up the clock. As he connects the wires the sheep man reassures him while his ex-wife tells him that the "cells replace themselves" as she holds on to her white slip. His girlfriend then accuses him of not knowing anything to which he agrees. After that the narrator does as he is told and leaves the valley. On his way down from the mountain he meets the boss' right hand man who tells him "I've got him right where I want him." The narrator takes his car and boards a train at the station. In the distance he hears an explosion. "It's all over" says the sheep professor... Heading back to Tokyo, the narrator stops in and sees J. Handing over a substantial amount of money he tells J that as his new partner, he wants a pinball and jukebox machine.

 

SOUL FLOWER UNION LIVE AT THE BIG CAT IN OSAKA

Amerika Mura in downtown Osaka is where the night owls go... Bars and restaurants, pubs and clubs, coming down from the northern side you take the Midosuji subway line from Umeda. The Midosuji line is of note because of the unseemly behaviour of some of the passengers. It used to be easy to see why there were female only carriages during peak hour. On day I saw a homeless man harassing a young female office worker as she stood in the doorway. No-one in the carriage came to her help her. She finally snapped and walked away but he stood there until another young woman got onto the carriage and the started all over again. It is hard to tell who to feel more sorry for, the young women who are being so blatantly sexually harassed or the homeless man who was to all intents and purposes invisible?

 

The Big cat is easy enough to find and like most shows in Japan the concert started early at about 6.30. The band is popular in their native Osaka and there was a big turn-out. There were a few other foreigners in the audience but mostly the audience were Japanese. I had first seen Nakagawa Takashi on TV when he had put a smaller unit together called Soul Flower Mononoke Summit which played Ching dong (street songs) from the war period played on old instruments of the non-electric variety. This was after the Kobe earthquake which had devastated parts of the region. Thousands died and my wife's parents were without gas for weeks and had to visit friends so they could have a bath. The band did lots of performances in the street to bring music to the people. For Nakagawa it was about playing music from the heart and through this kind of traditional music he also wanted to reconnect the Japanese people with their past free of its associations with the war and emperor worship.

Soul Flower Union was a congolomeration of two bands from the '80s, Mescaline Overdrive featuring Itami Hideko and Nakagawa's old band Newest Model. The combination of male and female members in the new band made for a more exciting blend of costume, nostalgia and genre hopping music ranging from Celtic swing, folk, reggae to rock and roll. With his 1970s style side burns, Nakagawa was an uncompromising songwriter prepared to take on the enemies of peace wherever he found them. Highly political, he wrote songs about East Timor and the Middle East in an effort to raise awareness of the plight of various minority groups caught up in military conflicts. He has also written about social injustices in Japan such as the problems (or even existence) of the burakumin (the untouchables) and on the album Screwball Comedy he had written a song about the right-wing Tokyo governor, Ishihara Shintaro, 'The Man Who Said No'.

SCRAPS FROM A READING JOURNAL

Carl Jung: Quoted in The Age newspaper 19/5/1990

"Are we our dreams, or are our dreams us? A Japanese poet once dreamt he was a butterfly, and ever after he wondered if he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt he was a man?"

Saigyo

"The mind for truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
At first, but then
Adds more and more depth
While growing greater clarity."

Mishima Yukio: The Golden Temple

"He did not try to assert his individuality by perceiving something that he and no-one else could see, but saw the object just as anyone else would see it." (p 246)

Natsume Soseki: Kokoro

"As a matter of fact, country people tend to be worse than city people. You said just now that there was no-one amongst your relatives that you would consider particularly bad. You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal circumstances, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men. One must always be on one's guard."

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Life is an inescapable rat-race in which you are constantly being spurred on my materialistic values to wrangle and squabble with your neighbour...The poet and the artist, however, come to know absolute purity by concerning themselves only with those things which constitute the innermost essence of this world of relativity. They dine on the summer haze, and drink the evening dew. They discuss purple, and weigh the merits of crimson, and when death comes they have no regrets. For them, pleasure does not lie in becoming attached to things, but, in becoming a part of them by a process of assimilation” (87)

Natsume Soseki: The Three Cornered Hat

“Anywhere that you can find railway train must be classed as the world of reality, for there is nothing more typical of twentieth-century civilization. It is an unsympathetic and heartless contraption which rumbles along carrying hundreds of people crammed together in one box. It takes them all at a uniform speed to the same station, and then proceeds to lavish the benefits of steam upon every one of them without exception. People are said to board and travel by train, but I call it being loaded and transported. Nothing shows a greater contempt for individuality than the train” (181)

Extracts from an overview of contemporary Japanese culture in The Age newspaper from the 1990s...

 

"There's a death wish operating through Japanese literature" says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese literary scholar (Accomplices of Silence). "Writing in Japan is always something of an act of defiance. Silence not only invites and seduces all would be speakers and writers, it is in fact a powerful compulsion throughout the whole society... Yet there have been those writers who refuse to be seduced (Kobo Abe, Hirase Inoue, Shusaku Endo (Japanese Graham Greene), Shohei Ooka, Otohiko Kaga, Saburo Shinogawa). In addition says Tokyo professor Shoichi Saeki, "The Japanese literary scene is now showing a return to ancient times where women were engaged in creative writing. Today, women writers both young and old are very, very active.

 

Yuko Tsushima, (A Bed of Grass) examines the roots of family distress and fake nostalgia... Taeko Tamioka, 57, "is a poet turned novelist celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says anthropologist Yukiko Tanaka "writing is the anithesis of the selfless submission described by Japanese authors. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self assertion.

 

... The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, Sando the Bailiff, Uegetsu, Tokyo Story, Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Narayama... Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise."
 

Shushin - Dotoku

"Again the aim was to instruct youngsters in the importance of respect for the common good. In a sense, it is what makes the Japanese education system truly Japanese... Individuals are diverse, but academic achievement is a group endeavour. Everybody is expected ot learn and everybody does."

Murakami Haruki: Norwegian Wood

The guitar... "Still, I like the instrument. It's light, simple, straight forward, like a warm little room, nice and cosy."

George Ohsawa: Jack and  Mitie in the West

"Japanese, Chinese and Erewhonian are all similar languages. In them there is no thought of possession and certainly none of monopolization. Thus, there are no quarrels. Such distinctions are the beginnings of all arguments." (p 56)

"I love sensorial beauty, but I love ugliness much more; the weak, sick, and ignorant much more than the strong, healthy and wise. I love the ingrate, the thief, and the assassin. That's why I am so happy. There is nothing to hate, nothing to attack, nothing to destroy, I love everything." (p 152)

"Dualism is one of the most serious diseases of man, a partial blindness that allows him to see only the spiritual or only the materialistic. It is a form of schizophrenia that produces all kinds of evil and that finally destroys itself." (p 52) 

"Japanese films such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai etc are quite highly admired in the West. But in Japan they are considered to be second rate stories for the masses - those with sensory and sentimental levels of judgement." (p 90)

 

Fukuoka Masanobu: The natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy

 

"People in the small, humble villages of which Lao Tzu spoke were unaware that the Great Way of man lay in living independently and self sufficiently, yet they knew this in their hearts... there is no need for philosophy in the farming village. It is the urban intellectual who ponders human existance, who goes in search of truth and questiuons the purpose of life." (p 30)

 

Tanazaki Junichiro: Some Prefer Nettles

 

"Had she not been his wife he might have been able to look on her as a play thing, and the fact that she was his wife made it impossible for him to find her interesting." (p 101)

 

Humphrey McQueen: Tokyo World

 

On Murakami's Norweigan Wood: "I's quite erotic, comic in places, but depressing. Almost everyone dies, or goes mad or both. At its worst Norwegian Wood could be described as a Mills and Boon rewrite of The Magic Mountain." (p 285)

 

"Are Japanese atrocities in World War Two the vindication of a half century of White Australian policy, Australian nationalsim, Australian militarism? What went wrong? Were Japanese attitudes the result of deficiencies in Japanese character or the result of western racism?" (p 84) 

 

Jack Kerouac: Haiku

 

"The sound of silence

Is all the instruction

You'll get."

 

Oe Kenzaburo: Prize Stock

 

"Inside a sticky black bag my hot eyelids, my burning throat, my searing hand began to knit me and give me shape. But I could not pierce the sticky membrane and break free of the bag. Like a lamb prematurely born I was wrapped in a bag that stuck to my fingers." (p161)

 

Oe Kenzaburo: The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away

 

"The small childthat is himself has just noticed that his own hands are grotesque, alien, terrifying "things" and, unable to throw them away, stands paralyzed. Immediately he pales, his eyes recede into their sockets and roll upward, exposing the white, while the skin around his eyes beads with sweat like delicate milk. His beautiful mother in her early thirties, her manner unlike that of the people in the valley beacause she has grown up in China, holds out her own hands and tries to distract the child, "Look, mine are the same, the same human hands." (p 39)

 

Ian Buruma: A Japanese Mirror

 

"I myself have worked as a lowly assistant to as a photographer in Tokyo, whom in the traditional artisan style, we had to call Master. Neither the Master, nor his assistants would tell me what to do, let alone how to do it. One had to "learn with the body" as they called it. One acquires the kata (the paper form) by sharpening one's instinct, by making mistakes and being humiliated. "But you never told me..." is never an excuse in Japan." (p 56)

 

"Heroes are by definition reactionary, fighting with their backs against the walls of history." (p 162)

 

Edward Seidensticker: Low City, High City

 

"Kawabata used to say that, though he found abundant sadness in the culture of the Orient, he had never come upon the bleakness that he sensed in the West." (p 209-210)

 

"The literature known as modern... is obsessively, gnawingly intellectual. If a single theme runs through it, that theme is the quest for identity, an insistence upon what it is that establishes the individual as individual... The rebellion against the family and the casting of the authoritarian father into nether regions... (p 250)

 

"Modern literature is altogther more national and cosmopolitan than Edo literature... Modern literature calls to mind not specific places like Shibuya and Kanda but that great abstraction 'suburbia'" (250 - 251)

 

Katai Tayama: Quoted in Injurious to Public Morals by Jay Rubin

 

"Dopp generally looks upon women with contempt.  There has been a tendancy in Japan since the beginning of Meiji to admire women, but of late it seems the tide has been turning and we have begun looking down on her again. There seems to be signs of this new tide in Europe as well. As far as I am concerned, the Japanese have always known woman for shat she is and have always taken an extrremely natural and proper attitude towards her.The post-Restoration tendency to admire women was nothing but a brief attempt to imitate Europe. The Europeans have always over-valued woman and worshipped her quite indiscriminately, but I suspect that they, too, have begun to wake up too late. be that as it may, I for one wish to express my complete agreement with Doppo's view of women... I fully recognise that there is a beauty in women to which none can ever aspire. But we can never recognise her true beauty until we realise fully that she is a thing to be despised. This may seem irrational, but it is not in the least." (p 62)

 

"... it is precisely the writer who has the ability to convey a sense of inner vitality and curiousity through powerful images, who contributes to the liberalization of society. If Natsume Soseki has emerged as Japan's greatest modern novelist, it is not because of the speeches his characters deliver, and certainly not because of any doctrines or slogans they spout, but because of the indelible imagery with which he conveys his view of the world - in otjer words, what he shares with a sensualist like Tanazaki (the second most likely candidate for "greatest") rather than with a liberal theoretician like Yoshino Sakuya." ( p 183)  

 

Karel van Wolferen: The Enigma of Japanese Power

 

"A popular sub-category of nihonjinron theories concerns the Japanese language, which is widely thought by Japanese to be particularly difficult to learn, not because of its insanely complicated writing system, but because it possesses a "spirit" unlike any other language..." (p 347)

Hal Porter: The Actors; An Image of the New Japan 1968

"Aware of the power of the white man, the Japanese are never free of – and cannot ever hope to be entirely free of – an internal warfare between rage and admiration, arrogance and servility, contempt and jealousy, a jealousy resembling that a crystal necklace might have for a diamond one. The thought of a white man is so heavy to the Japanese that he seems more than real. To a Westerner, on the other hand, the quicksand Japanese seem less than real, with a directness and naivete appalling to them, makes no bones about saying so" (p 87-8).

Interview with Ueno Chizuko and sandra Buckley in Broken Silence

‘Our primary goal is to not to be like men but to value what it means to be a woman. This aspect of Japanese feminism is deeply rooted in the history of the women’s movement in Japan as well as the individual experience of women. The emphasis on mothering over the individualism of American feminism is a characteristic shared by East Asian and some European women’ (280).

Ueno Chizuko: Nationalism and Gender (2004)

First wave feminism in Japan was not an ‘imported ideology brought from the West. Translations as a means of introducing culture always includes a screening process. From when it was first established, Japanese feminism  held an affinity for Scandinavian maternalism and rejected Anglo-Saxon individualism and egalitarianism’ (27).

 

Murakami Haruki on junbungaku, quoted in Jay Rubin: Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2003)

 

‘In Japan, with its relatively homogenous population, different literary customs have evolved. The language used in literary works tends to be the kind that communicates to a small group of like-minded people. Once a piece of writing is given the seal of approval with the label junbungaku – “pure literature” – the assumption takes hold that it only needs to communicate to a few critics and a small segment of the population. There’s nothing wrong with writing like that, of course, but there’s nothing that says that all novels have to be written this way. Such an attitude can only lead to suffocation. But fiction is a living thing. It needs fresh air (202).

Totman: The Green Archipeligo (1998)

‘Foreigners, and some Japanese as well, often speak fondly of a special Japanese “love of nature” that can be credited with this early modern forest recovery. To so argue, however, invites the tart query: did they love nature so much less during the ancient and early modern predations? More seriously, to advance this “love of nature” as an explanation would be to misconstrue terms. The “nature” of this sensibility is an aesthetic abstraction that has little relationship to the real “nature” of a real ecosystem. The sensibility associated with raising bonsai, viewing cherry blossoms, nurturing disciplined ornamental gardens, treasuring painted landscapes, and admiring chrysanthemums is an entirely different order of things from the concerns and feelings involved in policing woodland and planting trees…. (178)