"What a So Tasty!"

changing impressions of Japan

6 months total living somewhere is not by any means enough time to plumb the full depths of a complex society like that of Japan. Though the linguistic boundaries have begun to fade, that fact will never obscure the glaring differences between Japanese culture and my own.

(Above, a man wearing a protective face mask waits through the Osaka subway stop that serves part of the city’s bustling nightlife and shopping district.)

Things that were once so new to me - and perhaps intimidating - start to feel old… but never completely familiar. After a few months back in the U.S., the sight of an old person taking to the dense urban streets would be striking enough, not to mention one wearing a face mask. But in Japan it’s an everyday necessity for a far greater proportion of old people to go out, usually unassisted, by foot, bike, public transportation, or a combination of them. I’ll never think about getting around quite the same after such an extended stay in Osaka.

…and the things I thought I knew so well in the United States, like rock concerts, can be staged so differently here;

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(Vampillia performs December 5th at Unagidani Sunsui.)

As I recall, in this performance, Vampillia consisted of two violinists, a DJ, a bass guitarist, a lead singer/guitarist, a drummer, a cellist, a keyboardist, and an alternate lead singer. All of the members wore eccentric - if not outright bizarre - outfits. Their performance combined elements of hip-hop, reggae, jazz, classical, opera, and thrash metal. A purely Japanese approach to integrating many perspectives and influences into… well, I’ll leave the judging to you, if you may, one coherent whole that I thought was actually pretty enjoyable.

Overall, the scope of my understanding of Japan has broadened a great deal, but I have even more questions at the end of this visit. In my first post I hinted that understanding Japan’s increasing commercialism and Westernization might be the key to knowing Japan as a whole.

I’ve come to see there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, but I don’t expect to ever grasp it all.

public acceptability in Japan

What’s considered publicly acceptable naturally varies from culture to culture and place to place. And just as Japan’s density - the topic of my last post - contributes to the feeling of a public space, so do what have over a long time become the embedded codes of public conduct. Granted, people behave differently here compared to people in the United States, but one shouldn’t pass it off as mere weirdness or inscrutability.

This display I was startled to stumble upon at a busy corner of a shopping arcade in the city of Tenri. It depicts several dirty colons before and after the use of the advertised cleansing product (not the banana). Though my mouth fell agape at such a thing being so openly displayed, no one else batted an eye. My cultural conditioning would suggest such images be confined to the nethers of medical journals. But in Japan, it seems that using pictures of dirty colons for advertising a detox kit is just as acceptable as pictures of pearly whites on dentistry billboards.

There seems to be a certain level of public accountability tied to this difference in what’s simply acceptable.

Two posts ago I mentioned the element of danger at the Kurama fire festival, where hundreds of torches, from one-handers to massive ones requiring 4 or 5 men to carry, and that the event went over without a hitch. In the video I posted, notice the sheer density of the torches - reminiscent of the stereotypical angry mob intending to cause ruckus. This was the average bystander’s-faces-to-torches distance maintained through the festival, and no one carry a torch ever seemed to worry. It’s not like such a thing can go unnoticed, especially at an event where the fire is the main attraction.

Might I then postulate that the element of danger adds to the attraction? And might I as well suppose that it takes a type of culture like Japan’s to socialize people who actually carry out and witness such an event, with all its revelry, drinking, and thousands of strangers, without notable incident? The festival is open to the public and it appears a good cross-section of Kansai residents attend. I wonder what an equally representative sample of typical Americans would do with such an event. How much would the general plurality of the United States play into whether an event would even be allowed by law? …or am I remiss in attempting a generalization about Americans, who succeed with niche-marketed yet inherently dangerous events like Burning Man (still yet, note this lawsuit)?

on the Japanese urban landscape

The geographical landscape of Japan, from my recollection being upwards of 80% mountainous, means that any place we might call a city has to be built on only the remaining suitable land. In addition, it has to compete with the farmland required to sustain a population nearly half the size of that of the U.S. population, which is spread across an area more than 26 times as large as Japan’s. Crunch some numbers and it’s apparent why Japanese cities have quite a distinct feel. They’re dense, to say the least, but that means more than merely squeezing more things into a given area. I often find it difficult to distinguish between different zones or districts, it seems because everything is so crammed that drawing lines just isn’t possible. Similar to how a given Japanese person, it’s said, will likely claim to be non-religious despite participating in Shinto, Buddhist, or other rituals, the Japanese urban environment often defies delineation.

Here, a man sits at a bar itself only feet away from a small Buddhist shrine in Tsuruhashi, Osaka.

Yet, Japanese culture places great emphasis on defining where one thing starts and another ends. Their customs generally make it abundantly clear who stands in what position to another, and what sort of behavior is expected in a given situation. Homes and places of rest and relaxation are set apart from the outside by the agari kamachi, or piece of wood at the entrance way indicating that one should take off one’s shoes there, and enter wearing slippers.

Not so far from the Tsuruhashi district of Osaka is Dotonbori, a major shopping street in the Namba district of Osaka.

The signs here make it abundantly clear what one’s supposed to do in Dotonbori - spend, spend, spend.

But when there are so many people crammed into so little space, as is the case in every major city in Japan, additional problems arise. Great engineering feats allow large cities like Tokyo, for instance, to avoid catastrophes like flooding under the tsunamis that frequently hit it, but a lot of social engineering is required as well. For Japan to maintain its position as one of the world’s safest countries, it has to get its large and dense population to stay in control of itself.

Just a block or so away from my dormitory is this sign:

“Dangerous, do not enter!” it warns children, who could easily miss a step and fall behind the fence into the storm drain, on the way to school or the park across the street. I would assume that if people didn’t take heed of such dangers, and the many other dangers of dense urban areas, like moving bikes, pedestrians and cars all intermingling on the streets, then the generally very cautious Japanese government would have partitioned people off from such perils by posting up more fences and the like.

From Japan’s physical and social engineering that attempts to mold a happy, yet productive and safe society inside cramped cities emerges a distinctly Japanese urban landscape - dense and bustling, yet organized, productive, and generally safe.

Kurama Fire Festival - 鞍馬の火祭り

Late October, I had the fortune of being able to align my classes so as to attend the Kurama Fire Festival and experience the whole event, not having to return on the last train. Several friends and I arrived early enough to see the festivities begin, and spent the night near the shrine atop Kurama Mountain after the mass of other tourists had gone and the townspeople were beginning to clean up or go to sleep.

A Kyoto prefecture website says the Kurama fire festival “is one of the three most remarkable festivals in Kyoto. It is said to reenact the scene of the enshrined deity greeted after traveling from the Imperial Palace to Kurama-no-Sato village, at the end of the Heian Period.”

The festival is ushered in by children carrying torches around the town’s two one-lane main streets.

Here, a boy heads with a torch uphill toward the main gate of Kurama Dera.

As the children marched about, throngs of crowds showed up to watch the festival’s slow buildup to its climax at around midnight. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, the larger torches carried by adults weigh more than 80kg. The children on the streets disappeared gradually in proportion to the amount of larger torches that began appearing from the outskirts of the town, also headed toward Kurama Dera’s main gate.

From the various torches carried in from the surrounding town was built a massive fire around which gathered, from my estimate, around 1000 onlookers. Confused myself as to what was to happen next (or for that matter, at any point in the festival), a portable shrine (mikoshi) soon rounded a corner. Remarkably, the massive crowd parted without hesitation for a few younger adults carrying the roughly 2-ton mikoshi.

The highlight, or climax, of the festival came with both mikoshi reaching Kurama’s main shrine:

It took several minutes thereafter for the tired mikoshi-bearers to lift the shrines onto stilts, off the shrine’s floor. Those participants with some remaining endurance took turns pounding the same beat on a drum as loudly and furiously as they could, before the festival was ended with cups of sake handed to those still remaining.

I find it remarkable that a festival with such conspicuous elements of danger is open to the general public, gathered so densely in such a small town. At one point the marching of what appeared to be high priests was halted for precautionary safety, as a particularly fiery torch was snuffed by a nearby fire hose. And as far as I know, the whole even took place without notable incident.

Something about gender in Japan

Of course, there’s a lot to be said about Japan becoming “Westernized”, and almost as much to say about the effect on the perception of “gender” in Japan.

Japan has traditionally been a male-centered society, wherein females fulfill subservient roles in hierarchy dominated by men. I mean to place no value judgment on the observation that they’ve traditionally been encouraged (or perhaps coerced) to confining themselves within the role of homemaker, and nothing else.

As well as to continue the discussion about Japanese globalization, consider the behavior of specified gender roles emphasized in the following video. I recorded it at an American-style (self-labeled so) nightclub in Kyoto:

(EDIT: If Flash player isn’t working for you, try the video’s flickr page.)

Televisions like this are scattered across the walls of the dance club, suggesting that the club wants to embody the imagery portrayed in such rap videos. That is, assertive men taking front-stage in rap videos, the backgrounds of which are filled with attractive women. The women, in none of the videos I saw on the screens all night, did anything more than dance, watch, and essentially validate the men.

I might mention as well that the videos were usually completely unrelated to the music being played in the club. Thus, only the imagery in the videos seems to have mattered.

The video, and the club where such activities portrayed in it are reenacted, reinforce the normal subservience of Japanese women… but in a sort of supplemental way to that in which Japan has typically defined “womanhood.” It may not have been the rap videos that caused the women in the club to dance just like those in the videos dance, but I think it’s highly likely. The videos elicit an orgiastic state (in the non-sexual sense… yet, in the ) among the club-goers. The women in particular became more forthcoming in their sexuality, pursuing men but yet maintaining a combination involving coyness which I have yet to fully understand. The state of the female gender in Japan seems to be changing.

Japanese women have been subjected to subservience so long yet now are encouraged to be more aggressive, as demonstrated by this poster on the wall of a train station:

In English, top to bottom, it reads something like “You are a criminal if you touch a woman’s body on the train.” Then in blue, “Women should be brave and speak out if they’ve been touched inappropriately on the train.” The bottom says to contact the police if you’ve been groped on the train. The issue it means to address is that, of course, it’s wrong to grope, but Japanese women are afraid to speak out about it. Therefore they’re encouraged to speak out about it and exhibit some of the outward assertiveness found in such clubs as the one mentioned above.

The very definition of gender in Japan is changing as well. Can a person with male anatomy who feels more like a woman be considered a woman? What about if they dress and behave like a woman or undergo sexual-transformation surgery?

Several days ago in a Kyoto night spot, some friends and I happened upon several (self-proclaimed) transvestites. Here, they kiss the cheeks of a friend who’d joined us for the night:

(Photo by Frank Ferretti)

They both insisted they no longer had penises, but it was unclear whether they replaced them with something we may or may not call vaginas. Their female mannerisms were very convincing, and I would have considered them as much “female” as any other. In fact, one of them very closely resembled a female friend of mine.

So, where do we draw the line between the “genders” in a place like Japan, where women are encouraged to be subservient yet assertive, and under Western influence are encouraged even further to embody ideals like “self actualization”?

The Globalizing of Japan

In one little block of Hirakata I managed to find one of the most interesting manifestations of Western influence or… dare I say, worship, of the West? In the case of the murals in the following pictures, it’s both their content and sheer enormity, not to mention their simple presence I find worthy of some consideration.

For some reason it was found appropriate to plaster, next to a major thoroughfare of Hirakata City, a bunch of Western (may I presume American?) businesspeople having what appears to be a really good time in a meeting. It looks like business must really be booming for them. The Japanese above reads “Number 1” in any of “the industry” or “the business” or “the trade”. And, doing so well as business people, the mural seems to suggest “They’re happy as hard-working business people.”

Perhaps as a salaryman rides or walks by on the way to work, he is reminded to carry on diligently, and that it’s probably more fun than he thinks.

(notice the highly-Japanified KFC to the right, [Col. Sanders in Santa suit not depicted])

What I really find perplexing is the ambiguity of whether these murals / their message is attached to or endorsed by any corporation. The blue signs reference a casual clothes shop which may or may not be associated with the murals. Its lack of an obvious corporate association may suggest government endorsement, a la soviet state-issued propaganda… though I doubt it. A corporate image or not, it reminds me of Britain’s “Keep Calm and Carry On” WWII PSA campaign, wherein those five words and a small image of the Queen’s crown encouraged Britons to keep the economy going through troubled times.

Such an association is rather appropriate given the great emphasis placed on being a dedicated company worker, by the Japanese government and their society as a whole. As were one Japanese executive’s words recorded, “I’ve never said no to any of my job assignments - I was always there when they needed me.  I like men who do that: manly man… like Western cowboys! Men living for their companies are better than those who live for their companies; that’s why Japan’s developed!” (Roberson). The executive emphasizes this work ethic’s origin in wartime economic-productive nationalism - another important, albeit different sort of, global influence. Furthermore, if the murals are from the 90’s as suggested by the building’s age and the depicted dress style, then such a message would be even more fitting given Japan’s ([economically]) Lost Decade, from 1990-2000.

Reference: Roberson, James E. and Nobue Suzuki, eds. “Can a ‘Real Man’ Live for his Family?” Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 111.

JR Namba street dancers

A few days ago I set aside a few hours to check out Osaka’s Namba district, and happened upon an interesting scene at JR Namba station. Young people came and went through the building’s front courtyard, stopping to watch themselves and others dance in front of the area’s several mirrored walls and a giant reflective ball in the center. I wonder whether JR might have intended to create a spot for such a dance scene, foreseeing that people would enjoy watching themselves in the mirrors.

All the dancers appeared to be practicing more than showing off their moves. Alone or with friends, they would often stop in the middle of a routine or jump to another sort of dance without identifiable transitions.

When I started watching the dancers, the boy in the left of this photo was sitting listening to headphones, cross-legged with his eyes closed, nodding to the beat. After about 15 minutes it looked like inspiration struck him as he jumped up and started throwing his arms about and switching his feet from front to back very quickly. As quickly as he got up, he sat back down and started listening to music again. But as casual as the various street dancers seemed to take their pastime at some points, at others their moves revealed an underlying finesse undoubtedly acquired through many hours of diligent practice.

In the photo below, next to one of the mirrors a group is taking a break from the synchronized dance they were doing before I had the chance to photograph them. In the foreground you can more clearly see the distinct dress style of the person in the video after the next paragraph. His outfit is very similar in style to that of the dancers in this video.

I thought to ask him whether he intended for those particular shoes to match the big red block, but didn’t want to interrupt his routine.

At the entryway I met Alex, an American living in Tokyo and visiting Osaka for a few days. When I approached he’d been trying a break-dancing move involving tossing himself about on one hand under his torso, but he stopped for a moment to tell me a little about the street dancing scene in Osaka. The dance style in the video below, inspired by funk music, he said is called “Locking.” It takes its name from the way the dancers lock their hands bent backwards towards the forearm, and is very tightly synchronized with the music it’s set to (notice similar synchronization in the preceding video). In the background, a couple girls are practicing yet another style, for the most part watching themselves in the large metallic ball.

In the video you can hear Alex telling me that JR Namba station is the most popular spot in Osaka for these types of dancing. At a similar spot in Tokyo, he said, is where he picked up break-dancing. Among the various dances, that of the girls in the background of the video was also quite distinct, and notably more effeminate in its flowing movements.

But it’s not only in spots like JR’s Namba station that you’ll find street dancing. Train stations in general seem to be popular for it, even at Hirakata and other, smaller stations where I’ve seen it a few times. I’ve also encountered it by random chance on a street corner in Tokyo, where a visiting American with a boom box stopped me to show off a few moves just as unique as any I’d ever seen.

(Edit: For a history of locking check out this page, and a list of moves, animated, from Japan.)

Tanuki

Spend a little time walking around any Japanese city and soon you’ll recognize the ubiquity of these little fellows:

“Tanuki” are easy to spot in front of restaurants, bars, various shops, and even homes. They come in many varieties, from the roughly half-human height of the old-style statue above, to tiny childlike Tanuki, to full human-sized statues like this one spotted in Tenri, Japan:

According to The Japanese and Buddhist Photo Dictionary, the town of Shiragaki is home to Tanuki statues as large as homes. A friend of mine who visited the town mentioned eating at a coffee shop inside a giant Tanuki statue. (Another site has a great page on the “tanuki’s day off”, a celebration of Tanuki started in Shiragaki.)

So why are these critters so common? I asked a few friends whether they knew anything about the statues and found them completely at a loss. “I think it’s an owl,” one girl said, while another said he has “something to do with fertility,” and one more person suggested that the size of his testicles (which are always depicted very large) has a direct relation to the amount of wealth he is supposed to bring to the shop he stands near. One person referenced the Tanuki’s having magical powers of transformation whenever it places a leaf on its head. One Japanese student, about 20, said he’s encountered the real animal, but has no idea why there are so many Tanuki statues in front of homes and shops. Another Japanese student said he thinks they “help prevent bad things like disease,” and that young Japanese people don’t clearly know what a Tanuki is. I guess that having grown up with them all around, Japanese are not so shocked and curious about the bizarre and explicitly-anatomical statues that strike foreigners as very strange.

The Japanese and Buddhist Photo Dictionary says “Tanuki appear often in Japanese folklore as shape-shifters with supernatural powers and mischievous tendencies.” And in complete agreement with what I’ve seen, it goes on to note, “The beckoning Tanuki is most often depicted with a big round tummy, gigantic testicles, a flask of sake, a promissory note, and a straw hat.” The page later mentions that the Tanuki never pays the promissory note, going along with the mythical creature’s supposed trickster attitude.

Every Tanuki statue I’ve seen is clearly a Tanuki statue. There’s definitely a lot of variation, but I agree with Pink Tentacle that they all appear to share these traits:

“The eight traits are: (1) a bamboo hat that protects against trouble, (2) big eyes to perceive the environment and help make good decisions, (3) a sake bottle that represents virtue, (4) a big tail that provides steadiness and strength until success is achieved, (5) over-sized testicles (referred to as “blob” in the illustration above) that symbolize financial luck, (6) a promissory note that represents trust, (7) a big belly that symbolizes bold decisiveness, and (8) a friendly smile.”

The common Tanuki statue is in many ways an exaggeration of the real animal, which shares the name, that inspired it:

(image from: http://pettalestogo.com/TheRaccoonDog_ProtectIt.html)

By the way, I saw two Tanuki at around 1am at the Osaka Komatsu plant, so if you’re around there keep an eye out. I tried to snap a picture but given their magical powers I’m not surprised they managed to notice me and scamper off before I could.

Neighborhood Hirakata

Not quite the average resident of Hirakata City, it’s very difficult to experience the more complex social phenomena occurring on the other side of the social and linguistic barrier. But observing the city from an anthropological perspective, some of the more fundamental principles of Japanese society are still easy to see.

My neighborhood’s roads aren’t particularly busy, but for their size even the main thoroughfares can feel like bustling highways at some hours. This residential street connects a dense apartment zone and local park at one end with a shopping district at the other, making it one of the area’s more trafficked lanes. And it’s just that - a single lane on which commuters going both ways must contend for space, and at speeds which I never would have expected. At a glance, Japan’s narrow streets may appear dangerously disorganized. But that impression belies the underlying grammar with which people navigate these spaces, and which sets them apart from, say, the chaotic and unruly streets of India’s larger cities. Rules for getting around safely and efficiently in such small areas seem to be generally made up on the fly, though in watching other pedestrians and motorists I’ve noticed a few that persist for the most part. For instance, people walking tend to slip more toward the outside of the street, next to buildings, while bikes ride between them and cars on the street. Both bicycles and motorcycles drift between sidewalks/pedestrian-zoned edges of roads and the roads themselves, and tend to give walkers the right-of-way. Many people seem to ride the line between all-out rushing and responsible hurriedness but I have yet to see anyone behaving outright dangerously. There seems to be an air of mutual respect among people on the street who nevertheless just want to get to where they’re headed, but who often have to do so in very cramped conditions.

With people of all ages and types frequenting Japan’s dense streets, there appears a sort of microcosm of greater Japanese culture. It’s quite different in the US. While moving about in the public spaces of my primarily suburban existence there, few occasions arise in which I could easily commit a social faux pas. Quite simply, we’re each able to maintain our distance because of the car’s hold on American culture, and mostly don’t have to deal with social interactions on the street. The car, not the person, is the representative unit of an individual out grocery shopping, etc., and as such the nuances of filial piety one might find in equivalent circumstances in Japan have no place where everyone appears equal.

I learned the embarrassing way to acknowledge the social strata of older people on Japanese sidewalks when one challenged my spot on a sidewalk. Riding the left side of the sidewalk, I believed I was safe from social error because this is the way roads here function, and because it seemed to be the default side for most other pedestrians. However, an older man believed differently and, moving from his left side to my left side, he maintained his course and rang his bell furiously (if that’s possible) as if to say I’d been in the wrong. Perhaps he was drunk, or just wanted to take out some anger at a gaijin, but since then I’ve automatically given the right-of-way to older folks out of the respect they deserve, which I’ve seen others doing as well.

The manners organizing the chaos of the road seem to extend outward as well into neighborhoods and other public spaces. For one the almost absolute lack of litter in Hirakata and elsewhere attests to the respect for public spaces in the Japanese mindset, but other considerations speak even more to its deepness.

For instance, shrouds around construction projects help shield the rest of a neighborhood from these eyesores. They aren’t limited to neighborhoods, though, as I’ve seen them on any building under construction. They speak to what I feel is another instance of consideration for one’s neighbors and for the sanctity of public space. In a country with such limited space, it’s understood that not abusing it but acting as if it’s one’s own property makes it the most useful and pleasant for everyone. This seems to be the case as well with the tiny local park (at the end of the street in the first photo) which has been in use by at least 5, and around as many as 30 locals on the many occasions and times of day I’ve visited it. People walk their dogs, run, stretch, eat, play music, read, and bring their children to use the slides and water-squirting attractions nearly round-the-clock.

first impressions of Japan

If I were to post photos of the things that really impressed me upon first arriving in Japan, you’d probably see a lot of novelty quasi-English t-shirts, or shots of me throwing up deuces next to a beer vending machine. And if you could visually capture such abstract things as my profound exhuberance at being on an island on the other side of the planet - an incredibly beautiful one at that - surrounded by people who seem unceasingly pleased with everyone and everything, including the presence of oblivious gaijin like myself… then perhaps that photo might be as interesting as Japan itself.

But that first impression was a year ago, and thousands of photos taken then archived on my drive suggest that what makes Japan so fantastic is indeed that everything is cute. That’s their secret.

I’d like to think my appreciation of Japanese culture has matured a little, but I really don’t know much more now. However I’ve decided to take a bit different an approach to enjoying and attempting to understand Japanese culture this time around. Living in Kansai, I can easily spend a day at an ancient temple or climbing an awesome mountain, or just riding a bike around one of Kyoto or Osaka’s historic districts… all the while, of course, taking pictures and hoping I don’t look too touristy.

While the bustling cosmopolitan areas of Tokyo and Osaka are a lot of fun, there’s a lot to enjoy in “old” Japan. A lot of it has been co-opted and commodified though, equating a visit to a highly-trafficked temple like Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto to any day out shopping. Cultural relics like Kiyomizu-dera and Todai-ji are more tourist traps than sites of religious function, among the Japanese as well as gaijin. But the Japanese proudly cling to their cultural heritage, attempting to maintain old ways while rushing towards globalization.

Such is why festivals like “Eisa”, held annually in the taisho ward of Osaka, draw large crowds. Here, Okinawan Eisa festival participants demonstrate a traditional dance:

…regrettably I can’t say what is the purpose of the dance or anything about its meaning, but I have the feeling that a lot of others at the festival could not either. When such a ritual is demonstrated outside of its traditional context as so, understanding its original intent feels more academic than personally meaningful. Increasingly we - both Americans and Japanese - look at our traditions through a magnifying glass instead of finding them relevant to our lived experiences in the modern world.

A boy carries an Okinawan flag during a dance at the Eisa Matsuri.

A priestess dances for Amaterasu Omikami, the primary god of Shinto, at the yearly Shokusai Matsuri outside a Shinto shrine in Yatawa, Japan. Hundreds of spectators huddle for a view in the background.

This scene outside Kyobashi train station in Osaka demonstrates a few things that struck me moreso the second time visiting Japan than the first. Somehow I never noticed how dense things were last time, though granted now I’ve spent more time in a big city to notice, for instance, how integral bicycles are in so many people’s lives. These bikes are parked by daily commuters riding from Kyobashi station. More relevant to what I was saying, though, is the background. I’ve grasped more acutely how commercialized is Japanese society, which somehow feels even more commercial than my experiences living in the US. The billboards in this photo, topped by the Statue of Liberty, could almost be purposeful symbols of American economic colonialism in Japan. The bicycles, maybe, illustrate the throngs of people going to work in pursuit of the materialistic dreams accompanying the American influence.