TSURUBEI NO KAZOKU NI KANPAI: LIVE AT THE SOFITEL HOTEL, MELBOURNE

The call went out and they turned up in their hudnreds. The Melbourne Japanese expatriate community turned up on mass to see one of their own stand-up comedians sit down on the cushion in front of the microphone, Tsurubei Kanbei was a household name in his native country for his rakugo skills specialising in the Osaka dialect.

Officials ran up and down the length of the queue reassuring everybody that the doors would be opening soon. When the queue started to move we made it to the corner and then saw that the queue reached around a stairwell before it got back to the doors. We made it to the last stretch and then it was announced that there would not be enough seats for everybody. Luckily we had made it close enough to the door not to be turned away.

Inside the hall the cameraman was in the centre and at the very last moment the seat next to him was given a young man, a latecomer. Amidst the excitement at recognising other people in the crowd the show finally started. The NHK rep congratulated everybody for coming along and said they couldn't believe the turn up and how many people they had had to turn away.

The crowd cheered.

"We didn't know there were so many Japanese people in Melbourne."

The crowd cheered.

To start the show Tsurube explained how he had spent the day, During the day he had complained about the dry wintry conditions so he had been given some paw paw cream for his lips. He had also tried a meat pie, fed some birds in the park and been for a ride on Puffing Billy. In the morning he had taken a walk around the MCG. This had been rather arduous and then he met a young Japanese man who seemed to recogise him. When Tsurubei asked him, "Do you know who I am?" the young man had paused and then replied "Ebisu san?" This amused Tsurube no end so he kept asking the young man who he was and laughing out aloud each time when the young man gave up and said "Ebisu san?" With that he called the latecomer who was sitting beside the cameraman down to the front of the stage. It turned out that this young man was named Takumi. When he got there they shook hands, exchanged another laugh and then the show was ready to start.

The first of the performers sat at the microphone and compalined about Osaka grandmothers. He talked about wanting to eat eat udon and how when he asked for some money for dinner all he was given was some furikake. Some meal that would buy he exclaimed. He then said that he wouldn't tell anyone he was going for tea because all he was likely to receive was a tea bag. The second speaker lamented that he had recently performed rakugo in a much smaller theatre in Saitama where there had only been four people in the audience sitting in single file, one behind the other, facing the stage. He had sat and faced the audience and been the fifth in line. At the microphone he spoke about his trip to a tiny zoo where he was convinced to dress up as a tiger. He practiced moving his feet in imitation of a tiger. He was terrified when a lion was led to the cage only to discover that it was the zoo owner in the lion's suit. Finally Tsurubei came to the microphone to give his rendition of an ageing junior high school teacher with false teeth. He nearly choked on these in his rage at the lazy students in his class especially Akiyoshi kun who refiused to take down the notes for the dictation. To the teachers chagrin, despite giving them hints about what was on the test, they were the worst performing of all his classes. They were in fact so bad they were the worst class that he had ever taught but, despite that, he liked them the best. The audience erupted in enthusiastic applause as he choked oin his false teeth.

After a short interval Tsurubei came back for a more traditional rendtion of rakugo. The kind that the Australian Henry Black had performed in the Meiji Period when he lived in Tokyo and became a well-known rakugo performer. The show was over and it was off home trhough the city. The performance was to be broadcast on NHK so with a bit or luck they could relive the performance, especially that of the junior high school teacher with the false teeth. It was a sobering reminder in a world of excess just how much we enjoy those people and those events that get under our skin.

MILES DAVIS LIVE AT SHINJUKU NISHI GUCHI HIROBA, 4TH OCTOBER, 1981

October 4th, 1981, and Miles paces the stage with his PEPEPEPEPE beret on his head as a message flashes across the TV screen about his six year retirement and then about the problems he has had with his hips and how he has to keep moving around on stage. Mike Stern is there on guitar with all the hot licks and big sounding chords. Looking a little like Meat Loaf in his bulky denim jacket and shoulder length hair there is lots of space to fill on the songs as there are no keyboards. 

The band is on a stage in an outdoor area at the West Exit of the Shinjuku station in Tokyo. The concert is shot on video so the images are at times blurry especially when the camera tries to zoom in through the windows of the nearby office buildings and then tries to take in the passing traffic on the streets that run between the sky scrapers. 

The opening track is 'Back Seat Betty' and Miles seems very frail. He looks haunted. At times he doesn't look like he has enough breath to blow his trumpet but he has a crack band. Marcus Miller hunched over his bass and Al Foster dressed in an orange jacket with an orange baseball cap on drums are there to support a very young looking Bill Evans with his head band playing saxophone and Mike Stern on guitar.

During 'My Man's Gone Now' Miles smiles at Bill Evans before the percussion solo. It can't have all been hard going. There is some fat chunky bass and then Miles comes in on trumpet and, with a splash of colour on the the cymbals and some ratatat on the snare drum, the percussion solo is rebooted courtesy of some percussion based harmonics that sound like a theremin. Licking his fingers, Mino Cilenu seems to be able to create these strange sonic frequencies before coming to the front of the stage in his rainbow coloured pants. Again, Miles calls time on his trumpet and the band charge in. Miles directs Al Foster on drums who brings the piece to a conclusion with some intermittent crashes on his cymbals.

'Jean Pierre' is the final song in the performance and Mike Stern comes back in a starring role. The fluid lines on the guitar give way to some occasional raunch drenched groans while Marcus Miller keeps things going slapping the strings with his thumb in the background. Miles joins Bill Evans for the melody at the front of the stage before Bill takes his final solo. He is a young man with a lot on his shoulders. But he carries it well. There is a perfunctory end to the video and, without any credits, the dvd goes straight back to the menu.

'YOUR NAME' BY MAKOTO SHINKAI AND THE THREAD THAT BINDS

Yearning for someone... Searching for someone you have never met... Just a name written on your hand... This is a film about two teenagers body swapping. Taki who can't stop touching Mitsuha's breasts to the disgust of her little sister, Yotsuha, and Mitsuha who has to deal with Taki's crush on Ms Okudera who he works with. They learn about each other from the inside and then return to their own bodies leaving each other messages on their mobile phones so that they know what is going on.

Mitsuha lives in Itomori, a small country town beside an enormous crater. Her family take care of the local shrine where Mitsuha is one of the shrine maidens. In her town there is a tradition of weaving that goes back centuries. It teaches that through weaving, threads are bound together in profound ways that resonate throughout life. Her grandmother explains that:

"Musubi is the old way of calling the local God. This world has profound meaning. Tying thread is Musubi. Connecting people is musubi. The flow of time is Musubi. These are all the God's power. So the braided cords that we make are the God's art and represent the flow of time itself. They converge and take shape. They twist, tangle, sometimes unravel, break, then connect again. Musubi - knotting. That is time."

And so the narrative thread running though the film links the two teenagers in ways which transcend them across time and across their different experiences as boys and girls and geographical locations,  one living in the city and the country.

The crater is a reminder of a time in the past when a meteor struck the region. Since that time Mitsuha's family has been blessed with strange powers. In her case she can swap bodies with Taki. When a second meteor hits the town, Mitsuha and her friends and most of the townspeople are killed. Taki decides to go and find out what happened. He draws pictures of the town and the mountains to identify the regions. Together with his friends, Tsukasa and Miki, he searches for the town until they visit a small restaurant where the chef recognises the town from the drawing. He drives Taki to Itomori where Taki sees at first hand the devastation.

Taki visits the ancient shrine hidden beneath a huge rock in the middle of the crater and drinks the kuchikamizake that Mitsuha made with her own mouth. Taki loses consciousness and wakes up in Mitsuha's body. Together with her friends, Teshi and Sayaka, he goes back in time and tries to save the town before the meteor hits. Despite Mitsuha's father, the local mayor, who refuses to listen to their warnings, they commandeer the local high school radio station and declare an emergency. They direct the local townspeople who are attending the local matsuri to evacuate to the high school. Mitsuha's father tracks down the illegal broadcast and reassures the people that everything is okay. When the meteor hits, Mitsuha and her friends don't appear to have survived but there are far less casualties?

Later, when he returns to Tokyo, Taki sees a mysterious girl with a ribbon in her hair. After he and Mitsuha see each other from passing carriages in separate Tokyo trains they search the streets near the station until they meet on a staircase. Despite their yearning for each other they are unsure and greet each other with uncertainty. Cue for music and the titles...

MIYAJIMA TATSUO RETROSPECTIVE AT THE M.C.A.

The M.C.A. is on Circular Quay in Sydney just around the the Rocks. A few years ago it held a retrospective exhibition for Yoko Ono. This year the gallery was focusing on Miyajima Tatsuo and the exhibition was no less impressive. Despite the obsession of digital devices counting down from nine to zero the exhibition was about so much more. It included the work 'Megadeath' which covers two entire walls with numerous blue digital LED screens counting down from nine to zero representing the twentieth century, the century of death, which every now and then switches off so that the room is plunged into darkness. Then, after an unspecified amount of time, the LED screens flicker back to life and the countdown begins again. Then there was the work 'Arrow of Time; which sees a shift to tiny, little, red LED screens suspended from the ceiling. Visitors can lie down on cushions and pillows and watch the various countdowns above them. In a sense it represents time raining down onto the world. Miyajima explains the zero in the countdown which comes from the sanskrit as being that part of existence that is invisible while what we call life is that part which is visible. 

There were some interesting videos of his 'performances' art in the 1980s before he switched to objects and installations. He is interested in the concept of the 'Art in You' and in the relationship between the artist the object and the audience. According to the definition he gave in a video interview the the curator of the retrospective exhibition there is no art without an audience. With objects and installations he can communicate more effectively with more people. 

In another series of videos Miyajima had people countdown from nine to zero before immersing there faces in a liquid. The liquids included water, wine and milk. Water represented the amniotic fluids, milk represented breast milk and birth whilst wine has special significance form Christians. Coming out of the space where 'Megadeath' had been installed a little child started scraping its heels on the floor and then called out "Will that pierce my eardrum?" in the darkness." In another room down the corridor there was a slag heap on the floor on which a number of LED screens were counting down. These related to various statistics about fossil fuels in Germany. Around the slag heap a track for a toy train had been set up. Before too long a train came around the corner hauling a long line of carriages on which there were more LED screens counting down from nine to zero. These represented the Jews that had been taken to the death camps in Germany during the war in trains burning coal.

YMO: TECHNODELIC

Y.M.O.'s record Technodelic was released in 1981 and is a fascinating collection of electronic sounds and sublime packaging. The sounds are part of an era that gave the world Devo, Kraftwerk, New Order and Depeche Mode. For the Technodelic album the band embraced artwork that featured machine parts and cumbersome machinery that would have matched the look of the 1927 Fritz lang classic Metropolis. The shock of the new is shocking because it is not so new after all. The big knobs and glass dials refer to early forms of electronica that is pre-digital and pre-electronic. Petrol engines were still using chokes at that time as electronic fuel injection hadn't been invented and the mobile phone was referred to as a brick. The office furniture in one of the photographs looks like the furniture on display in Winston Churchill's war cabinet rooms in the London bunker. It is a world of Nordic severity, all hard lines and masculine edges with no female softness. That would have to wait for the bubblegum pop of the girl power era that would follow. 

The Yellow Magic Orchestra was apparently put together to fuse electronica and Orientalism in an effort to subvert Orientalism The lyrics on this particular album, however, seem to be defined by a sense of existentialist alienation and uncertainty:

"In the shadows by the wall

The stairs go on forever

They could be steel

They could be stone

They could even be paper"

In 'Seoul Music' there are, however, references to a Korea that confronts the young Japanese electronic musicians with the past. Whilst  Japan has emerged as a modern power and the young musicians want to free themselves from the shackles of Orientalism the past is not quite ready to let go... 

"An example of life in old Korea

The girl wouldn't let me take her picture...

Kimpo airport

An old man with a stick in white baji chogori

with a black katsu on his head

The taxi driver kept asking me if I wanted a woman...

Roadside pillboxes with armed police in front...

There is a curfew from midnight till 4...

From Busan you can see Tsushima

The speed limit for passenger cars is 37 miles an hour...

Korea has air raid drill once a month...

People over 46 speak Japanese"

This is a perspective that Chinese tourists visiting North Korea today seem to feel. They are overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia looking at a pre-modern North Korea that reminds them of what China was like before the period of modernisation. A period of austerity but also purity of spirit and purpose not yet tainted by consumer culture and the rise of individualism.

OE KENZABURO: 'DEATH BY WATER'

Death by Water is a book by the 74 year old Japanese writer Oe Kenzaburo. Like all his novels it is a meditation on his personal life so, apart from the protatognist Kogii Choko a 74 year old writer, there is Akari, his mentally handicapped son, and a character named Goro based on his brother-in-law, the film director, Itami Juzo. Oe is haunted by Goro's death as he is by his verbal abuse of Akari which has severely damaged his relationship with his son Akari. Most of all he is haunted by the death of his fatther in a boating accident on a river in Shikoku many years before. Kogii has long planned to write about this event which took place during his childhood but his plans were thwarted by his mother who refused to let him see the contents of an old red trunk that contained his father's papers. Ten years after her death, now in his 70s, He is finally allowed access to the trunk only to find that much of is contents have been destroyed over the years. Kogii is not alone in his search for meaning a theatre troop has been given access to the family house in the forest in Shikoku while they dramatise Kogii's writings. His sister Asa encourages Kogii to work together with the treatre troop in the hoe that they can all benefit from their mutual interests. Having discovered that they contents of the red trunk have largely disappeared Kpgii retreats to Tokyo where he verbally abuses Akari. It is his wife Chisakai who sends him back to Shikoku with Akari while she undergoes treatment for cancer.

Oe is a writer who writes from within the canon. As well as references to the great composers in terms of their influence on his son Akari who is a composer there are many references to the world of literature. There are descriptions of his library in Tokyo and the boxes of books he sends down to read in Shikoku. There are references to the books that he read in childhood such as is Hucklebury Finn and the The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. There are many references to the writers that have influenced his own writing such as William Blake in his novel  O Rise up Young Men of the New Age and T.S.Eliot whose poem 'Death by Water' from the Four Quartets is central to this this novel as are his meditations about the character 'sensei' in Natsume Soseki's novel Kokoro. And then there are references to Kogii's friend Edward Said, the literary critic, who once gave Kogii a manuscript of three Beethoven piano sonatas. Kogii's row with Akari starts when Akari is given a pen to use by a stranger to make notes on the score in a hospital waiting room. Kogii calls his mentally handicapped son an "idiot" which he later repeats later at night at home. This is unforgivable and becomes as much a preoccupation in the novel as are the circumstances of his father's death by drowning.

Kogii's failings drive the novel forward. There is the failure to write the 'drowning' novel. There is the failure to repair the damage down to his relationship with Akari. Then there is the failure in his writing to capture an audience. There are multiple references in the novel to poor sales despite his having won the Nobel Prize. The fact that he continues to write and that the theatre troop continue to wrestle with the meaning of his work demonstrates, however, that the work grows on. The failure of Kogii to write his novel becomes the stuff of Oe's own novel. And as the avant garde theatre troop stage performances for students and later a wider audience it can be seen that audiences can be aroused by questions about the past and our interpretations of the past.

MOJOMIREI LIVE AT THE GREEN MANGO

The movement of the Chiba train was violent in places as the commuters crushed against each other found relief on their smart phones. Rows of posters flapped and swayed in the breeze. They were advertising a fragrance called 'Moisty Diane'. Most of the passengers were already moist wiping their faces and necks with towels when they had an opportunity. The crush hour reached its peak and then the commuters were offloaded to find the next train. The castle in Disneyland flashed by the window as a schoolboy read manga on his smart phone. The girl standing next to him flicked through images of other girls pouting and scowling and pursing their lips as the poster on the wall advertised waxing and hair removal with the slogan 'Enjoy Girls'. 

Outside the central station the wave of commuters came to a halt at the crossing until the lights changed and then they spilled out across the tarmac in the brief break in the traffic. It was a sub-panic rush that slurped and gurgled its way past construction workers and a lone male with a megaphone talking about the economy. Up above the Yamamote train glided half empty on its way to Ueno station. On the train channel news there was talk of the resignation of the Tokyo governor for corruption. In the book store the staff gave the books a final flick with their feather dusters before opening time.

News was coming in from new Zealand of an avocado shortage. This had led to panic buying and an increase in the theft of fruit from the trees. The public were warned not to buy stolen avocados as they would not ripen properly. An Australian journalist exhorted the Kiwis to be strong in the face of calamity. Down south past the dormitory towns of Kawasaki and Yokohama the train ran towards Totsuka and Fujisawa where the apartments gave way finally to more conventional housing. 

I first met Yukio (aka Mojo Rising) at the Tokyo English Centre in 1988. It was a Gaijin House located in an old dormitory for journalists and run by a Japanese guy named Ken who ran a  bar downstairs. Yukio played guitar and took me to visit his old university where we played 'Dock of the Bay' and a few other old favourites. Later, after spending a year on a work holiday visa in Cairns he returned to Tokyo to import ethnic musical instruments from around the Asia Pacific region. In Australia he had learned how to play the didgeridoo. He got involved in the alternative music and healing scene. He has been to South Korea to play and regularly plays around Tokyo as well as doing massage.

Mojo Rising met me at Fujisawa and together we took the train back to his apartment in Chigasaki. There were boxes everywhere and pots and pans piled up on the stove and. Outside there was a bicycle with a flat tyre. "I don't ride it much" he said. Some old women watched as we made our way back towards the station with his didgeridoo, guitar and amplifier. His washing would have to stay on the line for another day. 

The Green Mango is a small restaurant that looks like a wooden hut. There were henna drawings on the walls and decorations made from drift wood around the windows. It was a short walk from the station but we needed a cold drink when we got there due to the humidity. Mojo Rising got out his instruments and his bag of tricks and sat there sorting out various leads setting up loops for his performance one by one. The leads were all tangled up or else stored away in old plastic bags. With the arrival of his friends they started experimenting with the mixer. There were some angry squeals as the microphone for the didgeridoo was too close to one of the speakers. The owners closed the windows and turned on the air conditioner. Some school children walked past on their way home. Despite the problem with feedback they needed the speakers where they were for the right balance. Finally they got the right settings, Rei the sitar player did his warm up and tuned his instrument with all its strings and then they jammed, getting into a groove complete with drones and Mojo Rising providing some percussion on one of his loops.

It was time to get ready. Mojo Rising had to be convinced but he finally changed his old t-shirt and put on some more suitable clothes with some bells strapped to his leg. It was a small venue with an even smaller audience. "Maybe ten people will be coming but it would be better if there were twenty" he explained. Omi raised his didgeridoo into the air to begin and then pointed it towards the corners of the room letting the instrument fill the niches and crevices with its ancient sounds. Unfortunately I had another appointment and when I left I had just enough time to get back in time if I hurried.