nostalgia

Update

Promised Dad I'd update this and let him know what I've been upto of late.

Discovered YouTube yesterday; never fails to amuse. Some favorites: Merry Xmas! - this song is fucken awesome. Narnia Chronic - rotflmao. Banzai Belushi - a classic. Walken Census - this is my model when answering personal questions from students. DeNiro Terror - deadpan ftw. Punk'd - some good ideas here. Idioteque - the Lyrics.

lots of year end parties have left me a little tired. making/trading mixtapes. i built a computer from the ground up, piece by piece, which certainly taught me a lot about hardware. i spend less time with the Tribe these days but still put in an appearance. have a couple of RP events to run soon. planning to head over to Kyoto for New Years and hear the Joyanokane, the temple bells which ring out 108 times at midnight. will enjoy some hotsprings and ryokan food while i'm there. hopefully find a nice yudofu restaurant in the Gion. i guess i should go see that movie. saw Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers the other day with a nice girl. excellent.

From todays notebook: "Today I escaped from a highly dangerous situation. Sitting in Wendy's on Sunshine St. with a medium chili and a child-size paper carton of milk, Morinaga. Waiting for King Kong. I have a centre seat. Bought this book, 3 pens in 3 colors, and a block of wood, carving tools, sandpapers. Tokyu Hands. Tomorrow morning my new kitchen shelves will be delivered. Reading Kafka on the Shore. Feeling like a character in one of his books. Memories of Takamatsu. I shall carve a daruma. Eyeless and lame. I escaped from almost putting a deposit on a place in Kami-Itabashi which I am certain - now - would have been regrettable. I shall buy a shamisen tomorrow with the money I would have lost. I chose this particular cover amongst so many because it resembles a maze. Obviously mazes have played out sybolic value strings roads crisscrossed beads of dew on the web...for a good while. borges. am I feeling a little lost? 5pm starbucks near junkudo bookstore. So, I didnt buy a shamisen, but instead a black Fernandez bass for 14,800, used on sale inc case. I fucked up and bought a ticket to a dubbed version of Kong - so switched it out and now waiting for the next showing at 6:30pm. Tokyo Metropolitan High School girl sitting across and one seat to the left at this 6-seat chocolate brown table with 2 blue lamps. Doing her homework. I wonder if she is the studious type. Here it can be cool. A subset of. And all the neon and cars flashing by. And I feel at home in the Bukuro. One tree with yellow leaves clinging. Windows into brightly lit offices. People working while we sit here sipping coffee and eating cranberry oat cookies. lots of studying and reading and talking looking cool. This girl is really cute. The navy TM uniform is refined, conservative, solid, crisp. two silver buttons on the cuffs. i can imagine molly millions in it. thick strands of black hair frame her face, cover her eyes just enough to suggest teenage shyness/angst/confusion/curiosity. someone once told me "you can smell the hormones". blues piano. the blue lamps on this table remind me of the blue enamelled tin cups from scout/guide camps. inklight floods the screen. lips curved like a mongolian horsemans bow. i imagine her father: he must be a stern bastard. he knows he has a beautiful, intelligent daughter. he sends her to a good school. he has to hold off the horde with his iron gaze and will. short dark blue tartan skirt. grey burberryesque muffler, mujirushi shopping bag. shes small. just realised i havent slept in 36 hours. up last night on adobe audition manipulating background hiss. some mazes have intersecting lines. some dont. a line has two sides. are the lines the paths, or the walls?"

Three

Image

3G zerg FTW

my new phone is the coolest shit EVAR!

the dang thing has 12 TV channels (at about 640x480 resolution,) FM radio, straight-up internet access, takes crystal-clear photos up to 2.0 megapixels and 1600x1200, decent video, infrared tech that allows me to charge all JR train fares in the country directly to my phone bill, built in text scanner, pen light in multiple colors, schedules and spreadsheets, light pen compatibility, and I can even play DOOM and BUBBLE BOBBLE in all their VGA glory! memory cards, personalised tamagotchi pets (which automatically interact with other handset pets on the train) and a boxing game that allows me to stick my boss' face on the opponent and beat the shit out of him (or infact the random faces of other people's bosses in my immediate vicinity.) its also motion-sensitive, so no more pressing of keys - just tilt the handset to the left and the cursor moves that way. awesome. plays mp3s and i-tunes files, memory cards and digital video input/output to download movies into it to watch while commuting, full video conferencing support, and language translation software (hilariously dodgy of course.)

if only i could play warcraft on it. /sigh

. . .

tonight a punch-up in a ramen bar. odd. recent recommendations: orhan pamuk "istanbul"; the ESX-1; Awamori; zombies; zazen; sunnO))).

Fuji / Nagauta

Long time since the last post here.

Summer holidays. Okinawa. Glass-blowing. Running The Visa Gauntlet.

Last Sunday went with Mr. Iwasaki to see a performance of Nagauta, long lyrical songs from Edo Japan. Mostly Shinobue, 2-3 Shamisen, 2-3 singers, and 3-4 Taiko of various type. I think I fell in love with the flutist. It happens sometimes, I'm not sure why. Her kimono was a wide flower pattern, white on ai-iro midnight blue. She wore her hair up on top of her head in a loose bun, and her eyes never left a space on the ground about 3 feet in front of her. The line of her hip and leg, drawn in seiza; the nape of her neck, trailing wisps of hair slipped loose from its binding; her melancholy eyes...entranced me for hours. I asked Mr. Iwasaki about her (he knows most of the musicians personally) but it seems she is married to the 2nd drummer. [frown]
A month or so ago I climbed Fuji-san. And what an event. Previously, I had sneeringly declared my contempt for the mountain. Following after certain comments by Dazai and others, I had had long and winding, more-or-less flippant conversations with Junko about the over-bearing perfection of such a mountain, of its too-beautiful, nausea-inducing photogeneity. He must have heard me, great Fuji, god that he is. I had been warned that he was a harsh deity, unforgiving and cruel, cunning and fickle; that he would call down storms to destroy those who sought to climb too high, steal their breath from them, tumble rocks on their head, choke them on clouds of plague insects, drown them in mist and lead them with signs and lights to plunge off sheer precipices, turn them around and twist them about and send them wandering bewitched through the gnarled and ghostly forests of shirakaba. Thousands had perished at his whim.


So I got altitude sickness. And barely managed to get to the top without suffering a full collapse, survivng on regular shots of canned oxygen and Meiji chocolate, crawling on my hands and knees for long sections near the top. The shape of the mountain. It's evil. By the time you near the top the angle has steeped to seem near-vertical. Like climbing up a blasted post-apocalyptic martian cliff. Red volcanic rock, boiled stone, bubbled and crumbling and light, porous, grating, eating the skin off your skeleton like bloody molars chewing on chicken bone. I saw a dead bird. How did it die up here? Lifeless, the mountain, except for the Presence. Beyond breath, it lives.

Near the summit, the dawn. I collapsed and watched the sun rise, a perfect circle of red fire in a bleach-white sky. Shouts of "Banzai" from behind and above. The sea of clouds; the south Alps like distant islands. My fingernails were bloody. I felt happy; the mountain basked in the light of the Sun Goddess. I could feel him stretching, the light on his face.

On the way down, stumbling and delirious, practically sliding most of the way, quickly a thick fog rose to swamp me, could barely see ten feet ahead. The switchbacks forever. Stumbling again, and again, falling. Countless trillions of midges, dense clouds of them, spotting my glasses black, covering every inch of me, thousands in my lungs; I could hear him laughing. Lastly, through the forest near the foot of the mountain, I could rest and collect myself. I sat by a small stream and drank some water. Uguisu birds, calling me to wander deeper into the woods; a surge of will; I resisted and wandered back to the bus stop. My legs quivering, my mind pulverised into a mush.

Somehow, this was joyous. I'd truly met the mountain. I had learned something. I had been taught.

Clocks and Beauty

Today I bought a clock and a wristwatch after not having either for over 2 years. Some sense of re-entering the river after an extended picnic on the bank.

Had lunch with Graf today, catching up. He is back in a "DnD Zone" and furiously creating worlds again; will probably run a new campaign in the coming months. We brainstormed out a basic neighbourhood of Ebberron's Sharn; I will play a Warforged former soldier / born-again Cleric of the Silver Flame. Think George Bush with a 7-foot Adamantium mechanised body, a two-handed shattered-quartz-crystal-headed mace, and the actual ability to call down columns of holy flaming wrath on his enemies or cure diseases with the mere touch of his hand. I want to play him without irony and without spite; a true believer. Should be a challenge; fairly antithetical to my own self. Schizophrenia here we come!

Enjoyed tea with the Iwasakis this morning, and had a great conversation about Australia, Japan, the end of the War. Mr Iwasaki is a professed pacifist, and his emotionally-charged opinions, given what I know about his history as a Japanese soldier in China during the war, always move me to a kind of humbling admixture of awe, sadness, respect, and anger. Goes well with the tea.

When I was in Australia, Japan felt like a dream. As soon as I return to Japan, Australia feels like a dream. I don't feel I live in a dream; but that the past is always dream-like; floating down the river; a child's rhyme stuck in my head.

Australia's beauty is of Country. Of peace and nature and space and light. A beauty of the ancient land and its history, woven in the wood of the trees, in the textures of the rocks. Japan's beauty is of Culture. Of word and brush and cloth and steel. A beauty of the ancient peoples and their history, cultivated in the fields, crafted in the cities.

Images of beauty:

the towering Karri near my father's house, white trunks soaring bridges to the sky, paths teased from the earth by the Aboriginal goddess with long white hair, spread across the heavens as the Milky Way.

the sheer geometrical perfection of a graveyard in deep Shinjuku, seen birds-eye from the 7th floor of a skyscraper, ancient beyond all reckoning, a faceted grid of stone lines and flowers, seeing it moved me to tears, thinking of those who had passed and would never return.

.
.
.

On Friday night, went to Ritsuko's exhibition, bought a huge black monstrosity of abstraction for 20,000; can't wait to clutter my room even more. Saw Terra for the first time in a year, and she was well.

Pictures later.

Pictures

Technology rules my life. Things crafted by human hands, pulsing with electricity. Between the internet, the light-trapper, the films and television downloaded (A Scanner Darkly; The Daily Show,) burned to DVD and digitally projected, the korg, the fender, the rat and the boss, the keitai almost dead, the sony headphones, the marcel proust novels on the ipod, the television, the heater, the hot watersystem, the stove, the microwave, kettle and toaster, the alarm clock and the vaccuum cleaner; not a lot else. Does this worry me? Not in the slightest. How cool is google satellite? anyone with an orbital rail-gun? /

/cheer /clap /spit on corpse /snicker /sharpen blades ...cold blood; preparation. /

spent time putting ink on paper fans and clear plastic umbrellas. something that eats into the surface a little. daryl hannah doing backflips. ri-chan and the tiled floor. /

*****

I am France

It's almost March. Crikey!

Mizuki and I went to the Yushimatenjin Shrine to see the plum trees in early blossom. First the white, then the pink. There was a man performing a show with a trained monkey. Dark thoughts. Piles and piles of wooden boards inked with the dreams of a million schoolchildren; addressed to the God of Learning. One I saw was a manga character with a sad/cute face thinking: "Will I ever be famous?" My fortune, given me by a mechanical lion dancer bobbing and weaving and cackling in glee, read; Chukichi, or Moderately Auspicious.

Hip-hop you don't stop. You don't stop.

I'm at this club Face where Ritsuko's mates Tada (Dr Peterson) and Hiro (Language Mic) are DJing and suddenly these two freestylers start asking me questions in RAP. Japanese Rap at that.

watashi wa nippon, namae ja nai
anata wa doko, bokutachi kikitai

[I am Japan, it's not my name
Where are you, we want to know]

This was all a bit too much in the heat and noise and smoke, and so I splutter around my beer:

ore wa lance
[I am Lance]

Which was heard as [I am France]

So I am answering questions about French culture for the next 30 minutes. Fun!

---

sickness of snakes. sleepless. lauren's b'day. troy and his stds. painless. red. sleet. underbar. early morning denny's. beck. mexican religious art. key largo. peppered steak. the prose edda. blood of the iron fist. failed keizai. aquarium. kingsblood. just good friends.

We're Not Alone!!!

Now I have two (count 'em -- 2!!) Friends In Blog. A veritable army. We could take on the world, if it was smaller and had less people on it. In it?

Not much else to say, really. Read Rob's shit. It's funny. Kinda. And all those pictures he talks about?? They're real. Really.

I'm planning to buy a digital projector this week. Am I getting too home-theatery? I'm studying my ass off for the level 2 Japanese test. My girlfriend, who is a native speaker of the language, struggles to answer the questions on this fucker.

Started an play-by-mail Call of Cthulhu campaign with a bunch of friends scattered across the globe. Momma I'm scared! I play a 42 year-old Morrocan truckie/former gun-runner and I look like Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas. That's the scary bit.

On another note, my friend Wendy in Italy was recently told to be careful of people claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary because some of the stories are not actually true.

Unlike THIS, which is totally genuine (they guarantee it, see!)

Splattered rice and a drift to the Right...

A little while since the last post here.

Work has begun again full swing, but my Uni classes have gone into their exam period so I get to play World of Warcraft instead. Tauren druids are fun.

Last weekend I made Mochi with Mizuki and a bunch of her friends from the mountain climbing club of her college. Event organised by the always supergenki Emiko. It was fun beating little rice grains to a pasty death on a clearblue icy day.

Damn it's cold.

OK - Rant Mode On

I am reading Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and it's fascinating. The complexities of what the Americans did here during the occupation astounds me. The way they 'set up' the Emperor as a British-style powerless figurehead as a way of manipulating the hearts and minds of the Japanese people...I am constantly reminded how 'set up' this entire country is.

But things are really changing. Everything from Koizumi's Yasukuni visits to the SDF's forays into Iraq...this year is the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2 and the demilitarization of Japan, and it seems the country is on the verge of some kind of major seachange. I was talking to an old lady today who had seen Michael Moore's film Farenheit 911 and I guess wanted to talk to a foreigner about it. She said with a pained expression on her face "It seems old men like to make wars for young men to die in." The phrase really stuck with me all day.

Just today a minor scandal broke in the papers about a government minister interfering with a national broadcaster and attempting to censor a documentary on the war crimes of the Showa Emperor. Everywhere I go I hear stuff about how Japan must "regain it's sense of national pride" or "reassert itself as a major international power" and this kind of rhetoric. To me this kind of talk is disturbing and a little saddening. But people will deny that any kind of right-wing shift is taking place, despite the clear warning signs. This shift I think is occurring at a global level.

As a teacher who sometimes works in public schools, I have to deal with another hot topic: the Tokyo state governments introduction of compulsory singing of the National Anthem and bowing to the Rising Sun flag at the beginning of each school day. Large numbers of teachers protested this and even striked last year, leading to retributive punishment from the Ministry of Education in the form of pay cuts and even terminations. The big twist came near the end of the year when a conservative politician asked the current Emperor at a press conference what he thought about it and the Emperor said he thought it was a bad idea to force students to be patriotic. This kind of threw the right-wingers (who continue to worship the Emperor as a divine being) for a spin.

Whatever...Rant Mode Off

Chichibu

The snow was deep yesterday. Thought I'd write about my Christmas trip to the mountains.

Mizuki and I took an early express train to Chichibu on the morning of the 24th. Chichibu is a town in western Saitama prefecture, about 1.5 hours north-westish of Tokyo. Saitama is often known as "the New Jersey of Japan." It's close to a great city. It's a suburban commuter area. And it's profoundly unfashionable. Adding the syllable Da- to its name gives you Dasai-tama, or Unfashionable Ball. Don't ever mention this to people who live there, though. The only cool thing about Saitama is the Saitama Super Arena, where major sporting events are held (including the year-ending Otoko Matsuri (Man Festival) on Dec. 31 where lots of big scary dudes from around the world beat the living bejeezus out of eachother in a square-shaped ring. Oh yeah and the Urawa Reds, who are apparently a good football team (don't ask me; I just teach them English.)

So anyway, we went Inaka (Beyond the Black Stump.) Out in the sticks in the uncoolest place in the country. Why, you may ask? Why oh why oh why?

Two reasons, and good ones:
God and Hot Springs.

Goddess in fact. In Chichibu there are a series of 34 temples dedicated to the Buddhist deity Kannon (Kwan Yin in Mandarin Chinese.) There used to be 33, which is a holy number, the soul spending 33 years in limbo before transmigrating to a new incarnation, but then this group hooked up with two others (in Kyoto and Wakayama, I believe) and added an extra to give a total of 100. Thems a lotta temples. Kannon is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened soul who has forgone the bliss of ascending to nirvana in order to help all other souls find their way thenceward. She is the goddess of Mercy and Childbirth. One of the temples we visited (perhaps number 6 or 7; I can't recall) actually has a strikingly out-of-place and Madonna-like statue of her holding a small child to her breast. It is thought that this statue, donated by a rich noble in the Edo period, was secretly crafted by an underground Christian group and surrepetitiously 'smuggled in.' Christianity was outlawed by the Shogunate of the time. Kannon is quite beautiful. She has a serene face, and sad eyes, filled with compassion for the sufferings of the world. But my deepest and most lasting impression of Kannon comes from the Sakai Masaaki TV show from the 70s: Monkey! She saves his hairy pink ass on many an occasion.



So we hiked around to all these temples, and our feet got REALLY sore. Up mountains and down valleys, past schoolyards and cement factories, disused warehouses, quaint cottages, gutters full of toxic slime, railyards, traditional inns, decorative glass-blowing manufacturers, five hundred year-old olive trees, maples, a forest of cedars and soba restaurant after soba restaurant (a local specialty, apparently.) At each temple we entered, we stopped to make an small offering and a prayer, surveyed the grounds and architecture, then had a chat with the monk on duty. While we talked he would, in beautiful ink-brush calligraphy, inscribe our books with the temple name, date, and a poem.



The days were short, so we retired early as soon as the sun dropped behind the looming peaks to the west. And then onto the onsennatural hot springs, the only other reason to come to Chichibu in winter. The hot springs were hot and springy, which is to say, just the way they're supposed to be. Which is a good thing. Really. And anyway, greatly relaxing after a day-long pilgrimage in the freezing December air. Scalding hot milky white water and steam so thick it feels like you're drinking when you breathe. We had roast chicken and salad and vodka for Christmas dinner (no turkeys out in rural Japan I'm afraid,) surveying the mountains and icy river below our hilltop ryokan inn.



One last thing about this town. It is dominated by a mountain. Buko-san. Quite an impressive monster. It looms so hugely on the sky that you cannot help but feel its presence at all times. It casts a long shadow over the valley. In times past the people of the Chichibu valley had two major gods: the god of the mountain, a male spirit; and the god of the dark wood in the center of the valley, a female deity. At the famous Yomatsuri (Night Festival) on Dec. 2nd each year the god of Buko-san would descend from his mountain seat in the form of the head priest's ceremonial staff, make a procession to the shrine in the center of the sacred wood, and meet his bride. The staff would be ritually placed in a hollow on the back of a turtle-statue to complete the symbolic union. This ritual continues to be practiced today, and the staff and the turtle are still there.

However....

Buko-san is destroyed. After the 2nd World War Chichibu, like all small communities in Japan, was pressed to find some kind of industry to help the economic recovery of the nation. It was found that Buko-san, the seat of the god, was largely made from limestone and stone perfect for the manufacture of cement, so prized by the state-supported (to this day) construction industry. So the mountain was cut down. I shit you not. I have never seen anything like it before in my life. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the top of the mountain is gone. Just cut out. The scar is quite plain to see. Most of the mountain is stripped bare of trees. Great tiers of grey stone can be seen from tens of kilometres away. It is a vast ugliness, a scar beyond reckoning.

So the question I have is: how does this psychologically affect the people who live in the shadow of this mountain, their own god whom they ravaged and destroyed in the name of industrialization? Every day, every minute, the corpse of this decapitated god looms on the edge of the valley, his body broken and torn. Shinto is a religion deeply connected with nature, and the Japanese people will tell you that they are deeply respectful of the gods of the natural world. I fear the shadow that lies over this valley. The murder of a god is not without consequences.