Japan (3)

This is a small story made long...

We arrived in Akasaka in time for a late dinner. When we left the hotel to go looking we made the mistake of turning left rather than right, which took us into the dormitory/office section of the suburb. Eventually we found  a Thai restaurant, but the whole experience was rather cold. There were almost no people round; one couple came into the restaurant - which was otherwise empty - just as we were leaving.

Next day we went to Kamkura, of which elsewhere, but in finding the station we also found the bit of Akasaka we'd missed the previous night. There's quite possibly more of this, but what we found was three long streets plus many cross streets & laneways with bars, restaurants, karaoke, cemeteries (they're everywhere) nightclubs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was on the station-side of the hotel. So on the way back from Kamakura we explored it a bit, ate dinner in a cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurant and went home.

(we're getting to the story, this is essential background)

Next morning I went out to hunt down some espresso coffee (the previous day we'd drunk brewed coffee, which is common, in a coffee place mildly reminiscent of Melbourne in the early 1970's - I'm thinking of Cambridge tea rooms off Block Arcade, but a bit less dark) because I'd noted a couple of espresso paces the previous evening. It was about 6:30, which is a beautiful time of day in cities where the average humidity is above 85%, and nothing was open. Except, I turned a corner into a laneway, and saw a guy with suitcase moving quickly and purposefully away from a youngish long-hired guy in a well fitted somewhat shiny (modishly shiny, not antique shiny) suit bowing deeply - bent double deeply - with quite a large grin.

Looked to me like the proprietor of a small bar/nightclub saying goodbye to his outstanding best customer, who was either heading home for a shower and a change of shirt or else turning around and heading back to work with more determination than good sense.

I saw what I saw, but the story is complete fiction. Plenty of other scenarios will fit the scene.

What particularly made an impression was the bow. It was so deep, and so fluid. He must have come very close to bruising his shins with his forehead. Bowing is a feature of the Tokyo service industry, but this was something beyond the usual. This was the bow as a small art form. And the smile. It was quite generous. I don't think I imagined it. On the bow I built the story.

Still, it may have just been the microculture of this context - I'm only guessing the bar. The thing about microculture is that it isn't really particularly significant. Take McDonalds as an example; it has a very definite microculture, but its significance is nothing other than to provide predictability to its clientèle. It wouldn't be sensible to make up any stories based on the interaction between a McDonalds' employee because that interaction isn't really based in  narrative. It's founded on a marketing manual.

So, travel stories. Maybe a series of acute observations or maybe just hidden stories from a writer's past. I spent a lot of time working in bars.

Race - Whitehorse to Carmacks

I noticed that for a blog about the Yukon River Quest, there's not a lot about it. So, out-of-sync, but here, this is what happened.

After 5 days of beautiful weather, the day of the race start, June 30, was wet & cold. This may possibly have been a blessing moderately disguised, as a couple of the crew were particularly heat sensitive. We all had cold & wet weather gear, so this was a chance to test it out.

Ground crew testing their gear

Despite having spent a lot of time planning how to pack the boat, come the actual morning nothing seemed to work quite as planned. Possibly this was not unrelated to the fact that nobody really wanted to stand around in the rain matching the packing with the plan; possibly people had thought of a few extra things they might need (previous optimism about weather now visibly misplaced); possibly it's a rule of the universe that the plan and the reality don't match. Anyway, the boat certainly looked full.

As ground crew (he said, affecting years of experience) you get to hang around feeling spare a lot of the time. This, in me anyway, produces mild anxiety. How is it all going to go? The Texan team, holders of the race record in 40 hours, didn't seem so anxious. Their food for the trip arrived at 11:30; 6 pizzas, which their ground crew immediately started putting into plastic ziploc bags. When you look at their timetable; 20 hours racing; 7 hours sleep; 15 hours racing; 3 hours sleep; 5 hours racing it almost seems like a different event. I mean, 10 hours sleep in 50 hours, that's almost reasonable. If you're insomniac, you'd probably say it was a luxury.True, the average insomniac isn't paddling 750 km in 2 days, but still. I was chatting to one of the Texan paddlers though, and in reality, fatigue is a their major problem, just like everybody else. Their major solution is to paddle faster; the extra energy expense has a mood-enhancing side-effect.

Seventy-nine boats entered. Fifty-seven finished. By far the vast majority were one & two person kayaks and canoes. Doing this race solo is almost too difficult for me to contemplate, but plenty try. In fact one of our team's advisers went on to win the subsequent 1000-mile solo race from Whitehorse to Anchorage, two weeks later. That's really, really tough.

Of our team of five ground crew, only one wants to do the race himself. It isn't me, although, I would like to paddle the river in a more measured way. It's a very storied part of the world.

Japan (2)

No sooner had I finished writing the previous entry when I ran into a newspaper story about Japan and, specifically, Hiroshima which reminded me of many things. Firstly, That Japan is the only country on which a nuclear weapon - in fact two - has been dropped, a fact which serves two different narratives (maybe three) that I am familiar with. There is the "they deserved it" narrative, less commonly heard now than in the 60's, but still audible in the background, and the related "only way to finish the war" narrative (this is the hypothetical third narrative, because it's not completely clear how different it is from the "just deserts" story). Opposing those is the questioning of the USA's geo-political morality, called into question by the fact that they are the only country to have actually used this horrendous weapon - a weapon so terrible that they claim no-one else should be allowed to use. This reminds me, not quite tangentially, of the curious Clint Eastwood double, "Iwo Jima" / "Flags of Our Fathers", films by an actor/director who simultaneously stands for moral certainty (Harry Callahan) and ambivalence (any of his westerns), offering some kind of even-handedness in their discussion of the US-Japan war.

Secondly - that took a long time coming - I was reminded of how much information comes from newspapers ( I read three every day, pretty much) and how hard it is to access information systematically which has been gathered unsystematically. IF I stop to think about newspapers as a source, then suddenly I realise that I "know" "lots" about Japanese domestic politics, media, banking & foreign policy, which receive probably more coverage in American newspapers than any individual European country - although less than Europe in toto - a statistic that reflects Japan's place as a superpower of the late 20th/early 21st century.

Thirdly I was reminded how hard it is to give a comprehensive account of something; how unreliable the brain is.This was immediately reinforced when I got down to mapping out the notional opening sentence of this blog - "My first impression of Japan was ..." - because my first idea of a first impression was the luxuriance of the rice paddies around Narita airport and I realised that I had omitted something else from my list of preconceptions about Japan, that being the repeated images of childhood geography featuring Asia as a rice-dependant world. Images of flooded paddies, bent or squatting farmers, straw hats, terraced mountains, images of Asia as a non-technological world. And this, irritatingly, is not even the final equivocation that I have to make before starting the story, because my real first impression - and I promise, no more distractions - was in the departure lounge at Sydney airport, where JAL had more staff than I have ever seen in an airport lounge, organising passengers, handing out information, managing the queue, providing a level of service that I don't really remember ever having seen before. This, too, was something I had heard about Japan - legendary customer service and attention to detail. It was in evidence everywhere - even foreign airports.

For all that, economy class, even on JAL, is pretty much cattle class. Nothing to report, except to say that the in-seat TV screens are a boon. Probably the games are more playable for a generation that grew up with Nintendo game controllers, but I certainly improved over the four legs. Particularly pleasing was the Shogi (Japanese Chess) program, which gave me a chance to get a feel for the game. My feeling is that I need a lot of practice! In particular, the sudden reappearance of what used to be your pieces, attacking your king, is disconcerting. Also, the knights are even less use than in Chinese chess (they appear to only move forward to two squares - in Chinese chess the knight can move to the same eight locations as in European, but may be blocked by a piece orthogonally adjacent). Plus, the gold & silver generals take a while to integrate. Anyway, it's certainly less humiliating to lose your first few games against a computer.

Japan (1)

I'm weeks if not months behind in this blog, but I'll try & catch up before the semester moves into overdrive.

I mainly went to Japan to catch up with one of my former students, Yosuke, with whom I have stayed in touch fairly assiduously in the five or so years since he was in Australia. Not that I haven't always been vaguely interested in Japan, but knowing someone personally was enough to tip the scales on going.

He asked me, what do you think about Japan? This is my attempt at the start of an answer.

IT's a very complex question, what do you think about something? Any answer says, for one thing, much more about the "you" than the "thing". But once aware of that, you should be very suspicious of what you see, because what you see might be yourself. But if you are too suspicious, you might not see anything at all.

Take, as an example, early European pictures of Australian Aborigines; they look much more "European" than "Australian". So an Anglo-Australian mode of seeing indigenous Australians now is different from 250-odd year old mode; note I'm not claiming either as more correct; differently mediated is as far as I can go.

Similarly, think of the double meaning of the question "What is it like?" On the one hand, that asks for the character, maybe even the essence - compromised word - of the thing. Simultaneously, it seeks comparison: well, it's like this, only different. But what you think about this paradigm is also coloured by self & experience, so each further comparison intensifies the picture of oneself and hides the landscape.

So be warned - this might not be about Japan at all. But I will do what I can.

It occurs to me to start with what I knew about Japan before I went; what have I heard/read, and what did I think about it? In the 50's in Australia the word Japan primarily evoked the war; before I was ten I had read four or five books on the lives of Australian soldiers in POW camps. This was a popular genre; not one which painted Japan in a very favourable light. In primary school I can remember a teacher disquisiting about "cheap Jap junk" (the triple alliteration is pleasing to the Anglo ear); from this I might infer that the early days of what later came to be known as the great Japanese manufacturing miracle were more focussed on price than quality - this is a pattern I have seen repeated with Korea & China. Whether the pattern is in the story, or the goods, I can't determine; probably a degree of both.

By the 1970's it was becoming clear to some that trade with Japan was going to be an essential component of Australia's economic future. That required a certain degree of "re-education" of the public view of Japan, which was largely still informed by post-war attitudes; the government sponsored messages to the effect that the war was a long time ago, it was an anomaly in Japanese history, it was time to forgive and forget. Schools were encouraged to set up Japanese language programs. Students were encouraged to learn Japanese, to facilitate trade. These messages were resisted by some conservative groups, such as the Returned Servicemen's League, but even conservatives like the smell of money and people were starting to notice that actually, Japanese products were frequently cheaper & better than local or European or American and over time the general post-war animus died down. It was a long time ago, and the rapid growth of the Australian population due to emigration and the post-war baby boom meant that the percentage of the population who felt personally involved in the war grew rapidly smaller.

Not that these debates meant a huge amount to me at the time. They were just there, in the background. They must have made some impact, because I still remember them, if dimly. They form part of what I know.

The most significant impact Japan made on me in the 70's was, I would say, Zen Buddhism.

I can't really reconstruct how this happened - was it by chance that my eye was caught browsing the Pelicans (a blue Penguin imprint, and I've always been a sucker for blocks of massed colour. I worked my way through Faulkner because the local library had all his works in one uniform set, and Dickens because the school library had his likewise. I'm grateful for the Faulkner, though.), or had I read about Buddhism in Kerouac first so that my eye was likely to be caught, or did my interest come from somewhere else? You could say that Zen was part of the hippie/beatnik zeitgeist, and that it was washing around Australia 10 or 15 years after it had washed though America, so I was naturally caught up in it. Anyway, for one reason or another, I read a few books about Zen and consequently about Japan. Also, courtesy of the same library that gave me Faulkner, I read Mishima's tetraology, "Sea of Fertility" - not that I remember much of it. The sex, mainly, that's what 13 year old boys remember about most literature.

Mind you, it's not just 13 year old boys & many people have drawn attention to Japanese sexual customs; particularly the mystery of the geisha, the relationship between the geisha & prostitution, hostessing, what exactly do all those "salarymen" (a peculiar term which for no good reason that I can see is applied only to men earning a salary in Japan, who, apparently, are somehow so different from the rest of the world's salary earners that they deserve their own unique epithet) do after work, the sexually-objectified adolescent girl, etc. etc. If you stop and think about this, it's a bit puzzling; why pick on Japan? No-one particularly thinks to describe America in terms of the world's biggest sex industry. You might say that national sexual stereotyping is a bit of an ongoing joke, and that's true to some extent, but it seems to me that it's only with Japan that the joke isn't a one-liner.

Anyway, I've drifted somewhat off the topic of Buddhism. For a variety of reasons my interest in Japanese Buddhism lead me back to China, rather than deeper into Japan. One of those reasons was the Tao Te Ching; but perhaps another was a story about Japan that was, I think, emerging already in the 70's, and to some extent dominated perceptions in the 80's and early 90's, and that was the story of the Japanese as perfecters of other people's beginnings. So, for example, the Chinese invented tea, the Japanese perfected the tea ceremony; the Chinese invented 禅 , which is zen in Japanese, and the Japanese perfected it; the Dutch invented video-recorders, the Japanese perfected them; The Americans invented cars, Toyota etc. You get the picture. It was a mantra of the corporate world in the 80's, TQM, incremental improvement, whatever name it went by. But part of the story was also that the Japanese don't invent, they only modify. I've always been interested in origins (before I developed more critical sophistication), so I went from "zen" to "chan" to "dao" and thereby China. Of course, Japanese wasn't on offer at my high school, where Chinese was. That may also have made a difference.

During the early seventies I was into games; chess, and Chinese chess & Japanese chess - of which I knew only the rules, having read one book about it and lacking opponents to play against. Shogi, to give it its indigenous name, is very interesting with a significant, and so far as I know unique, wrinkle in that a captured opponent's pieces become one's own, and can be redeployed at any time and place. There were other games, Go (Wei Qi in China) and Go-moku (Five in a row, if I have it right).

Go is another thing that fits the story of "invented elsewhere (China), perfected in Japan"; today the top players are still Japanese & Korean. On the other hand, the last time I looked, the Five-in-a-row world champion was Ukrainian. (You might say, if I were really "into origins", chess would've lead me to India. Maybe.)

Over the seventies, eighties & nineties I also broadened my reading of Japanese writing. Not hugely; Marukama (extensive), others whose names I can't remember; claustrophobic books set in overpowering cities with alienated narrators. This idea of the dystopian hype-city, exemplified by Tokyo, was another theme of the post-70's Western perception of Japan. The metropolis of Bladerunner is heavily dependent on Tokyo, although the de-humanised urban dystopia has Fritz Lang as a European progenitor - I presume amongst others; I would guess all cultures always have ambivalence towards urbanisation, but Japan/Tokyo took over, for at least a while, the predominant image of the unhuman city. The Japanese books I was reading reflected these Western concerns. At first one thinks, alienation is the common concern of all people, it's natural, but later I came to ask, why were these books, of all the books written in Japanese, translated and published in Australia/America? Was it because they best conformed to pre-existing images of Japan? Were they chosen to confirm, rather than reveal? My deepest intuition now is that they were.

I've also seen a few Japanese films (when I try to count them, it seems like an embarrassingly small number, maybe 20 or 30, surely no-one could call that significant & yet unconsciously, as one builds up a world-view, no-one thinks about statistical validity). "The Ring" is one scary film.

"Ran" is the best film adaptation of a Shakespearian play.The main impression that I take from those films, though, is a softening of the urban landscape, a sprawling, untidy suburbia which seems more intimate and community minded than the suburbias of my life. Images of Japanese suburbia seem friendly and alive, where Australian suburbs are cold and empty.

I've left out of all this the idea of "face" which pervades Western ideas about Asia, and which, in my opinion, is of absolutely no value whatsoever except as an excuse to stop thinking about the "other". "Face" is an excuse, by-and-large, to blame the other for failure to communicate. Not that there isn't face - just that every culture has it  & it is no more a useful marker of Asia than, say, black hair.