Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye Japan

so this blog runs off into the distance with a wet japanese flag in its little hands.
goodbye.
goodbye students, goodbye teachers, goodbye JET.

goodbye friends.

goodbye nissan march, shinkansen, mountains, insects, town hall bureaucracy, Route 2, all nighters in neon lit cities, drunken salary men high school redux, Hiroshima, Kokkora, all the hurting hearts, dreams fulfilled and dreams disappointed, Green Oasis, fun and boredom, rock and roll and the blues, airplanes, this heat, horrible midget dogs, pocari sweat, uniqlo, no central heating, robots, hangover drinks, Yamaguchi, yaki niku, kaiten sushi, castor no. 1...

I'll miss you, I hope I'll see you all again one day.

finally some noise

At lunchtime I flew into Fukuoka direct from Shanghai… straight back to muted public spaces, minimal eye contact, and wooden body language.
Standing at the baggage carousel I felt like the volume on the whole world had been turned down. A dog handler bowed as he got his dog to sniff me.

Wired from lack of sleep I dragged my stuff over to a hotel in Tenjin and slept til the evening - when I met up with Rob to go and see the legendary Acid Mothers Temple.

When we finally found the club - Decadent Deluxe – it was on the top floor of a peculiar building that I recognised from a previous Fukuoka adventure. I’d stood staring at it one hungover morning with a friend… it looks like a cross between the ginger bread house in a fairy tale and a Gaudi bad dream.

When we walked in I was expecting the venue to be full of Aum Shinrikyo rejects and Gandalf type figures with long white beards but the crowd was made up of fresh faced University of Fukuoka students come to see their friends in the support bands….
… Who turned out to be pretty good. There was a lot of experimentation going on … in a kind of Bjork, haunted house ambient , and shouty post punk way.
It was all a little bit polite though, and Rob and I were knocking back the Tequila Redbulls and nattering when some people carrying a step ladder and a couple of vacuum cleaners started setting up right in front of us. please Enjoy…


Unfortunately i had to compress the video to fuck to fit it on youtube so its a little difficult to see what's happening.... one guy's got a beat box and the two others are sticking straws into the sucky bits of vacuum cleaners, a bit like you blow onto blades of grass when you're a kid. there are a couple of cool girls dancing and quite a lot of the audience lookng bemused and bored!

There’s a theory . its in a book…. That Mark read… And told me about.
It says that in most societies there is a wide spectrum of possible behaviour… Obviously most people fall within the bounds of normal mainstream behaviour; and then around the edges there are many gradations away from the centre – from kooky, to slightly eccentric , to odd, to weird, to nuts, to plain scary barking mad.
In this kind of society its perfectly possible to be quite a strange misfit and still live and function pretty happily within society your whole life. Basically you can occupy the outer margins of acceptable mainstream behaviour and still be accepted.
In Japan however, the theory goes - behaviour is much more regulated and circumscribed, and on the edges there is a much narrower spectrum of acceptable eccentric behaviour. In fact once you venture outside the mainstream of normal behaviour you’re very rapidly outside the walls of society - on your own – out in the void.
This theory explains why when Japanese people fall off the edge, they really fall off the edge.
Japanese people have no road map for behaviour once they go outside the norms of convention. It explains why when someone kills someone in Japan they tend not to stab someone a couple of times – they stab them 47 times in the throat.
There is very little (non-organised) crime in Japan, but during my two years in Japan there were never more than a few months when some extremely unpleasant and bizarre murder took place. Ones that stick out in my memory are the little girl in Hiroshima who was found chopped up inside a cardboard box, the English teacher whose body was found in a bath filled with sand, and the student who killed his mother, cut off her hand, painted it and put it in a flower pot, then went to an internet café with her head in a bag… before turning himself in at the police station.

Murders scare me a lot, and human existence seems bleak when I think of what kind of lives and thought patterns those people must have experienced to lead them to those acts.

But… on the plus side… the rigidity of Japanese society means that when Japanese people creatively go outside the box they go brilliantly outside the box. I think that’s what we love so much about Japan.... and sometimes we mistake this very atypical behaviour for something typically Japanese.

When this trio, who may have been called Pachura finished their piece Rob turned to me and said “That was the best thing…” and we both said in unison, “...that I’ve ever seen in my life!” But then me and bob both like a bit of noise.
Maybe you should dance to this after drinking a few Tequilas and redbulls.

Out of a Cloud of Insects a shining Spear appears directed straight for your Heart

Now we were well and truly primed for the appearance of Acid Mothers Temple. At some point in the evening a giant oak tree had appeared backstage and out of its nooks and crannies, strange figures had emerged and started to wander amongst the crowd with stooped shoulders, waist length hair and large hairy feet.

The Mothers were finally on stage and I raised my camera up to take a picture,
“Hey Marko the lead singer druid guy just gave you the finger!”
I protested that I was too insignificant to warrant his anger, but Rob said it was because I was the only gaijin in the crowd and stood out like a sore thumb. (one moment – isn’t Rob a gaijin too?).
I looked at the lead singer, his dark eyes glinted menacingly. He had the kind of facial expression I imagine Jesus had when he was upending the money changers tables in the temple and chucking them out; or a native American Indian after doing the Ghost Dance which he believes has made him impervious to the white man’s bullets.
This performance was definitely not a joke to him ... in fact for him it appeared to be a religious ritual. I looked at the photo I’d taken and understood that you cannot take a photo of the Acid Mothers Temple.
This is the photo -

The double drummers started up and we were moving. At least two of the band wore wide uninhibited grins on their face. I wanted to dance and get swept up in the rush, but the driving rhythm was somehow unpenetrateable . I started to feel very clumsy and light headed and actually felt like I was asphyxiating. I went and sat down to get my breathe and saw that rob had sat down on the other side of the room. Looking at the crowd I realised that even the Japanese crowd who can usually dance in perfect metronomic sync to any rhythm were looking ragged and uncoordinated. The song finished with the fifty year old lead drummer sweating and shouting with desperate look on his face like a whipped horse.
There’s nothing easy about the Acid Mothers Temple and to be totally honest I didn't particulalry enjoy them as as a musical experience... it was hard work! although I did as an experience. It was an appropriately strange and enjoyable marker on a descent into disorientation that characterised the last few days of my two years in Japan.

and oh yeah, – you actually can take a photo of the ATM. (click it!)

Shanghai

Flow into Shanghai with a broken heart,
drift out into the ocean.

I flew into Shanghai - and got off the plane thinking what am I doing here on my own in another country where I can’t speak the language ? I should be with my friends enjoying my last days in Japan on the beach.
But my ticket wasn’t changeable... and there I was with ten days to go.
I took the Maglev train to the City outskirt - at 430 km/h - it felt like like a special effect as we accelerated and shot past the BMWs and Mercedes on the Expressway.

Down a back alley not far from the Bund I found a slightly disreputable old hotel and fell asleep all afternoon.
That evening I started walking around the city and realised I’d come to the right place – the people here smile, and actually meet your eye and shout and laugh and fight and drop litter and kiss on the street. It feels like a half way stop home.
At dusk I was sitting outside the Shanghai Museum on a stone pillar that was still hot from the day’s sunshine, when they turned on the fountain and kids started running around in it to cool down.

Later I walked back over to the Bund to mingle with the crowds and look at the kitsch sci-fi skyscrapers in Pudong - the finance zone on the other side of the river...
My hotel room was old but fairly clean, and it had a huge big double bed and a long window overlooking East Beijing Road…. I spent a lot of time lying around on the bed, writing, reading about the history of Shanghai, and smoking cigarettes…
From the 1880s for a 100 years the British, French, Americans and Japanese ran the opium trade out of Shanghai.
The companies formed at that time are still some of the biggest companies trading in Hong Kong.
When the Chinese government objected to this trade the British humiliated them using overwhelming armed force to protect their business interests.
By the early twentieth century shanghai had earned its reputation as the most decadent, glamorous and evil city in the world.
There were gangster armies, brothels and thousands of drug addicts. Life expectancy for the Chinese inhabitants of the city was 27 years old.

After the Russian revolution in 1918 many of the Russian aristocrats fled here , and when they had spent their money became criminals and prostitutes.

In the early 30s Japan was trying to colonise China, and when there were anti Japanese riots in the city, the Japanese bombed neighbourhoods that were against them.
During the same time Jews fleeing from Europe started to arrive in their thousands because it was one of the few places in the world where you could live without a passport of visa.

By 1948 the Japanese had been expelled and the Communists had taken over. Chiang Kai Shek (their general who kicked out the Emperor, and by most accounts a scheming horrible inhumane man) took the banks' gold and fled to set up a rival state in what is now Taiwan.

Mao cleaned up Shanghai, but by the 1960s he was losing control of the central government.
To take the initiative again he encouraged 'The Cultural Revolution' - an ultra hardcore movement to wipe out old bourgeoise non communist values. The Cultural Revolution was coordinated from Shanghai by the Gang of Four.
People in Shanghai who had connections with foreigners (just about everyone) could be beaten up or even killed. The red guard competed with each other for who could be most extreme and wiped out any remnants of Shanghai's foreign past.
On one day 1,000,000 members of the Red Guard marched in the central park in the city.
Young city people got sent out to the countryside to work as peasants.

Mao died in 1976, and the gang of four were overthrown and accused of corruption and conspiracy.
Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, (one of the Gang of Four) was put on trial in 1980...
'"Jiang Qing remained unrepentant, hurling abuse at her judges and holding famously to the line that she was "Chairman Mao's dog - whoever he told me to bite, I bit". Jiang Qing's death sentence was commuted and she lived under house arrest until 1991 , when she committed suicide by hanging"

Now Shanghai is moving towards capitalism again and the government wants Shanghai to take over from the Hong Kong as the financial centre of Asia.
The city is full of sci-fi type skyscrapers, foreigners are back, and drifting through the streets its difficult to imagine the things that happened here. When I visited the square where a million red guard had marched on one day, Mama Mia had just opened in a brand new theatre...
Around my hotel it was difficult to get a sense of this history from the achitecture but wandering through the City, especially around the Bund you would come across amazing art deco buildings from the early 20th Century in between the skyscrapers…
One day I decided to go and find the old city…. It turned out to be far and away my favourite place and I kept going back. A maze of tiny alleys, hung with washing, full of tiny shops, people fixing things in workshops, old men in shorts, naked children being washed in the street.


I was looking at an old tin in a junk shop window and was taking my camera out of my pocket when a voice behind me said “Please go ahead and take a photograph – it would be an honour and delight , my esteemed friend.”
Or at least similarly ornate words. It was an old man, who like most of the old men hanging around in the July heat was bare chested with a belly hanging over ancient shorts. He lead me into the shop and translated for me as I haggled over the tin with the shop owner.
The shopkeeper was naturally outraged by my paltry offer, but at a certain point in the negotiations the old man reported “It has been a very hot day and you are the first customer in the shop, and so he is prepared to make a deal…”
Outside the shop with my tin wrapped in newspaper I realised for the first time that the old man wasn’t actually related to the shopkeeper in any way , but just happened to be wandering by when I looked in the shop window.
I complimented him on his English, and he told me he had originally learnt English in the Forties and then - when he saw Nixon visiting China in 1972 on the TV – he took it as a sign of things to come, and decided it would be a good idea to start studying the language again.
Then he indicated an even narrower alley off the alley we were already in, and asked me - “Are you interested in pink. I can show you some… its just five minutes walk down here.”
I wasn’t sure what pink was. I was thinking maybe he meant pink jade… but there was something subtly corrupted about the aura of this apparently sweet old man ( … which wouldn’t be surprising for anyone living in Shanghai for 70 or 80 years.) I had a feeling whatever pink was it would involve me sitting in an obscure dark apartment up several flights of stairs in a crumbling block; from which it would be difficult to escape without parting with significant amounts of cash. So I politely declined and he walked off apparently unconcerned. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask what pink is.

I'm glad I got to see a bit of the old city, because it feels like it may not be there in five or ten years time. The Chinese American guys I hung out with (who I met through Tammy) said they'd been watching the skyline change every six months... and in the old City you could always see skyscrapers approaching on the horizon and demolition areas opening up between the alleys and lanes...

Back in the centre of the city, on the big pedestrian shopping streets full of MacDonalds, Uniqlo and Disney stores you felt you could be any big Western City... but with a less obvious police presence.
One beautiful warm evening while we walking round the streets, Joe, one of the Chinese Californian guys asked me whether my preconceptions of China had changed in Shanghai. I told him how recently the media is constantly talking apocalyptically about how China is going to take over the world... but to be honest as far as I could tell maybe that would be a good thing ... they couldn't fuck things up much more than the Americans.
The next morning I turned on the TV in my hotel room for the first time, and the screen was filled with a propaganda report on exercises by the Chinese Military... massed ranks of tanks and jets bombing dummy targets... and I clicked back to reality and remembered that Shanghai has been set up to give an impression that doesn't reflect the reality of what's happening in China. Yeah the Chinese probably could fuck things up as much as the Americans.

shanghai photos

into space with shanghai kids' agitprop

concrete

Ever since I moved to Kuga (a year ago) there has been some kind of elaborate construction project going on just down the road from the pedestrian subway near my house on Route 2.
At night coming home in my car I would have to weave through a maze of bollards and psychedelic swarms of warning lights.
A small army of unemployable people were employed to stand around in fluorescent jumpsuits and helmets. Sometimes they would act as human traffic lights waving their mini light sabers and bowing at on-coming traffic, but mainly they just stood around in groups of two or three in all kinds of weather at all times of day and night… just standing.
Sadly I never saw any of them fight giant robots and reptilian monsters. (see here).

As the year progressed me and Mark became more and more excited about the construction project. There’s not much to do in Kuga (pop. 10,000). We speculated what it would turn out to be… it looked like it might be some kind of covered market (my guess) oooh, or a bus depot (Mark’s guess) aaaah.
Wow! we were really excited.

It turned out to be a second pedestrian subway under Route 2. Sigh.
But I should point out it's not just any pedestrian subway, as I think you can see from the photo (click the photo for full scale). It is a mega-subway that could easily accommodate a Tokyo rush hour crowd followed by several tanks. Which is good because I would guess that the total amount of pedestrians that will use the subway in any 24 hour period would be about 25.

More Concrete

It’s well known that Japan’s economy runs on concrete. Whenever the economy is getting weak or unemployment is rising the government announce massive construction plans around the country… (followed by scandals when its discovered that important grey-haired government officials have taken bribes from construction company heads in return for tenders).

The result is that Japan has very little unemployment and very well maintained roads and even in the most remote rural areas you can’t find a mountain or stream that hasn’t been re-structured with anti- landslide concrete lattices or anti flood concrete river banks. Oh yeah and every coast is surrounded by concrete anti-tsunami and erosion break waters.
But enough of this… I’m beginning to sound like the loathsome celebrated foreign moaner - Alex Kerr. And let's face it - its got to be a good thing that the Japanese re-generated their post-war economy through construction rather than pumping money into the military-industrial complex (hello USA!).

p.s. nature.

PS. (Ive got to get in the post scripts – not much longer left in Japan) There’s a gripe I’ve often heard about the Japanese relationship to nature… that says that despite all the zen mumbo-jumbo, the Japanese do not live in harmony with nature – they control it and prune it and shape it, and restructure it, and cover it with concret until it becomes something else.
While I think this is true, I think that Western observers forget that the nature of nature in Japan is different from the nature of nature, say in the Cotswolds, UK...
In Japan you take two steps onto a piece of grass during summer and your skin erupts with itches, rashes and insect bites... so of course the Japanese want to make nature a bit more consumer friendly.

I know about the dangers of Japanese nature form personal experience because my after- school cleaning duty is to keep the undergrowth at the back of the science block at bay. Me and a troupe of dysfunctional teenagers usually sit around twiddling our thumbs watching giant wasps, mosquitoes and armies of ants carrying the corpses of small mammals off to their castles. Then an adult authority figure will walk by and we venture into the undergrowth looking busy where we get stung.

available in lawsons

In my local convenience store you can buy condoms for heterosexuals promoted by Andy Warhol!

Andy Warhol was a famously gay artist who surrounded himself with transvestites - after he became morbidly afraid of women as a consequence of being shot by the deranged president of radical feminist group S.C.U.M. (the Society for Cutting Up Men). Its no wonder the Japanese are supposed to have the least sex of any people in the world.

I’ve always thought Andy Warhol was a genius of space age consumer alienation... even though some people think he was a talentess souless vampiric exploiter of human weakness, and generally a creep. I suppose it boils down to whether you think his glorification of consumer blankness was satire or not.

Anyway I was really happy to find out that the Japanese dig him too… it makes perfect sense. I’ve seen Andy Warhol character dolls and quite a few people people wearing him on teeshirts.
He’s nowhere as big as other western style icons like Audrey Hepburn or Beyoncee Knowles whose ghosts permeate Japanese high streets, but its nice to know that he’s lurking around out in the cultural hive mind. specifically in my local convenience store.