Category Archives: Japan

Cold Shoulders and Pocket Tissues

Posted on April 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

I have newfound sympathy for the tissue dispensers of Japan.

Ok that sounds a bit odd so here’s the explanation for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to wander the streets of Japan.

The humble flyer or pamphlet may be king in your part of the world but here in Japan the pocket pack of tissues reigns supreme. It’s unsurprising really in a nation so concerned with allergies, the flu and even the slightest case of the sniffles that they will don a mask without a moment’s hesitation that tissues would become the predominant force of street level advertising. Wander down any street in a major city, or in fact along any route with guaranteed foot traffic, say the front of a train station or the path leading to a university and you’re sure to encounter someone trying to hand you pocket tissues emblazoned with advertising.

In the past I’ve smiled, shook a hand, told them, “I’m ok thanks.”

Never again.

Last weekend in Tokyo after doing some pre-wedding dance rehearsals, not my wedding, right by the entrance in Yoyogi Park I figured I’d managed my quota for mild embarrassment for the day.

Nope.

One of the dancers that day is the man behind Sayonara Speed Tribes. We have a mutual friend and having met while playing poker, using pistachio nut shells in lieu of chips, we evidently know each other well enough for myself and the soon to be betrothed buddy of ours to be roped into handing out flyers/postcards for the screening of the documentary that night in Shimokitazawa.

So outside Yoyogi, quite possibly illegally, we set to the task of dispensing with a stack of around thirty postcards each, alternating between basic Japanese and English when we saw non-Japanese faces we tried to flog every last one of them.

Bousouzoku dokumentari de gozaimussssssssss.

Biker gangs in Japan documentary!

So how’d it go?

Well, it may have been a lovely spring day but boy did it feel frosty.

We were snidely laughed at by young Japanese men who thought it hilarious that a foreigner was handing out flyers and/or speaking Japanese.

We were flat out ignored by many people who simply refused to acknowledge our mere existence.

The young men did that too; it was quite the double act.

We were even dodged like the possessor of some virulent disease, the pedestrian taking an almost comically wide berth as they evaded our attention afraid we might breath advertising on them.

It was a nice reminder of why I often enjoy small city life so much. It’s not just being a little further south that makes where I live a bit warmer.

On the other hand though, some people did stop. Some even spoke. It wasn’t unrelenting cold shoulders and that made all the difference. Ten people in a row flat out ignoring you really is made all the easier by just one person paying the slightest bit of notice to you. Saying something, even if it’s saying, “no thanks” or just smiling and shaking their head makes an otherwise thankless task so much easier.

So if you took a flyer off me on Saturday, thank you!

And if you saw me dancing in the park… then let’s just pretend I was trying to give you a flyer.

Sayonara Speed Tribes on DVD.

Sayonara Speed Tribes on DVD.

Find out more about the movie and buy the dvd here.

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Sayonara Speed Tribes

Posted on April 3, 2013 | 2 Comments

Bosozoku

Bosozoku.

I can remember the first time I uttered the word in public. My class of elderly ladies giggled. My useless textbook had translated the term unbelievably loosely as teenager. It was frankly, a shit translation.

Sayonara Speed Tribes does a far better job of conveying what the word means; what it is coming to mean.

Literally the term bou-sou-zoku (暴走族) translates as violent-speed-tribe. It was a handy term coined by Japanese newspapers during the heyday of the biker gangs that emerged in post war Japan to describe the loitering youths, the joyrides on motorbikes and the violent clashes that occurred when these groups crossed paths.

By the 70s these groups, like all subcultures tend to become, were highly ritualized and ironically as subcultures always seem to do reproduced much of what they claimed to be abandoning and rejecting.

These bosozoku wore the uniforms of kamikaze pilots, ran their gangs in shades of samurai honour and enforced the sense of senpai and kohai that remains a dominant thread in Japanese life. They even retired from service, slipping either into the normal life of salary man or the criminal world of the Yakuza.

To me, the whole thing bears a disturbing if occasionally comical resemblance to a high school club. The uniforms, the training, the ritual, the respect for one’s elders and the necessity of carrying on the torch for them when they leave are all hallmarks of the life they apparently reject.

But things are changing.

Modern police tactics and the passing of time have led to a steep decline in bosozoku numbers and a move from violent outcry of youth and rebellion to pick and mix cultural identity.

It’s at this point where Sayonara Speed Tribes picks up the story.

Sayonara Speed Tribes follows the path of someone who stands with a foot in both worlds.

That someone is Hazuki, a legend within the bosozoku world. He is also a man left stranded by how quickly that world has changed, by how much he himself is desperate to change.

Fascinatingly, Hazuki lets filmmaker Jamie Morris into his life and allows him to see the changes he’s trying to make, the life he’s fighting so hard to build as at the age of forty he attempts to leave the world of bosozoku and Yakuza behind in order to follow his childhood dream into the kickboxing ring and beyond.

It’s an at times funny and moving documentary as Hazuki proves to be the perfect thread to follow between the past and the present realities of these groups. A charming figure, it’s hard not to root for him, not to hope that he’ll find the happiness and respect he craves.

Yet, Hazuki bears all the markings of his tribes, the tattoos and the scars of violence. In trying to leave his youthful world behind he still cannot shed the signs of his past life and rebuild.

For all that struggle though, I recommend you watch him try.

To learn more about the fine folk behind this documentary visit Figure8 Productions.

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A Foreigner in my Own Bed

Posted on January 28, 2013 | 6 Comments

A single beam of light slipped through into the room as the shoji (Japanese style sliding door) crept open just a few centimeters. I bolted awake. It wasn’t my own bed I was asleep in; I was staying at a friend’s family home for the night and was currently enjoying that first night of sleep common to hotel rooms, half asleep, half awake and keenly aware of the foreignness of my surroundings.

And that’s before you factor in the tatami floor and shoji.

I heard a scraping. A flash of it, hurried, earnest and utterly new to me.

What manner of guest had snuck into the guest bedroom in the dead of night?

What on earth produced such a rapid burst of scratching?

“Mary?”

And with that her cold wet nose, shining eyes and panting mouth were face to face with me as I lurched back on the futon in surprise.

Evidently tiny dogs named after biblical figures are more than capable of opening sliding doors and scaring the bejesus out of me.

I suppose it’s to be expected. Staying in unfamiliar surroundings often leads to such moments.

Then there’s the danger that occurs from making familiar surroundings unfamiliar.  Salarymen generally achieve this by getting blind drunk and forgetting what apartment they live in within your nondescript box of a building and thus stumble drunkly into your room only to discover that not only is the contents of said room foreign to them but so is the resident.

I’ve never forgotten to lock my door after that.

So when I eventually venture back to the UK from time to time you’d think I’d find some comfort in the familiarity of home. My old bed, the absence of endless crickets chirping throughout the summer, the double-glazing cutting out most of the outside world should all lead to a peaceful night’s slumber for my wearied jet lagged limbs.

But the door creaked on its hinges. It swung open with a bang. That familiar noise transported from tatami mats to Matt’s wooden floors. No futon but the opportunity to launch beneath the bed before I could catch a glimpse of my early morning visitor.

For *#%*’s sake… Rodney…

I shuffled away from my pillow to lean over the bed and look beneath, found nothing, wondered where the hell he’d got to (cut me some slack, this is a pre-coffee story) and then promptly saw him peek out from the other side of the bed before darting out of sight. I clicked my fingers on the right side of the bed hoping to lead him out to the door. Evidently my sister uses clicking as a signal for something else because I immediately heard a mad dash, crash and whump as he landed in the bed behind me. I turned to find him across my pillow, laying on his back, paws pulled up and a quizzical expression etched across his mug that that seemed to say,

“What? I’ve been here the whole time.”

And he had.

My bed, my futon, was back in Japan.

This one belonged to Rodney now.

You bed stealing little...

You bed stealing little…

 

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The Ojigi’s Up Part 2: Dogs and Monkeys

Posted on January 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

So where am I now?

How far gone am I?

Well evidently I’m at the stage of ojigi-ing to strangers on the tube, I also accidently said sumimasen (excuse me) to a group of people earlier that day as I made my way through a crowded corridor at Paddington station. Fortunately I rather mumbled it and beyond relaying my embarrassment to my friend who was with me at the time I doubt anyone else was the wiser.

But, Japanese is there now, firmly locked into my head for at least as long as I live here and that is beginning to have other side effects beyond excessive bilingual politeness.

Because not only is it locked in; it wants to get out.

It wants to show off. Or I do. Frankly I’m not sure where to draw the line.

First of all there are natural trigger points for the language. It has in some way become automatic as the incident with the inadvertent sumimasen-ing demonstrates. If I’m thanking someone at a shop 99% of the year I’m saying doumo (thanks) or arigatou (thanks) and if I happen to be in Kyoto well I’m saying okini (thanks for saying thanks). Ta very much is generally no longer on the menu. It’s on the specials board but only makes an appearance around Christmas time. It’s a seasonal specialty if you will and makes about as much sense to the Japanese as the idea that Yorkshire pudding is not a dessert.

Home sweet... wait I am in King's Cross, right? Great, like I wasn't confused enough.

Home sweet… wait I am in King’s Cross, right? Great, like I wasn’t confused enough.

Then there are the moments where a Japanese word would actually work far better than an English word.

Natsukashii which translates as nostalgia or ahh that takes me back works far better in Japanese and conveys a multitude of feelings in a tenth of the time it takes in English.

Genki which means how are you? Is not only the question, it’s the answer. The how are you? exchange boiled down to two words.

Also it can be used to describe a hyperactive kid, a naturally energetic person and a person surprisingly energetic for their age too.

Japanese; more in common with a swiss army knife than a katana.

Then there’s KY. It’s short for kuuki yomenai and directly translates as can’t read atmosphere. I’m sure you know these kinds of people; most of us at some point are one after all. But as short hand for your socially useless mate or relative it’s a real time saver and compares favourably to, “Him? Yeah, he’s lovely when you get to know him…no, I know he seems like a dick now but…”

So there you have just a sliver of what’s going through my head as I walk around my hometown. A constant but rather patchy subtitling system throwing up possible alternatives that fulfill the criteria of being better than the more common term but then rather falls down on the fact that you are the only person within god knows how many square miles who has any idea what you’re saying.

It’s like dogs and monkeys I suppose (cats and dogs, a bad relationship).

Maybe English and Japanese just isn’t supposed to share one cranium.

There’s only one thing for it.

Talk to the family dog.

Turns out he already knew suwatte (sit).

I might have taught him last year…

I may have taken the idiom the wrong way.

This may be chronic.

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The Ojigi’s Up

Posted on January 14, 2013 | 2 Comments

It was my third time home and I knew things would be different. The first time I came home Japan was still new and shiny, I hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of the country, the language remained utterly mystifying beyond the simplest of exchanges and I had little idea that some two years later I’d be visiting home for the third time still with no end in sight to my time in Japan.

Coming home this time was different for a quite simple reason; I’ve passed what Malcolm Gladwell coined The Tipping Point when all the little things begin to coalesce and emerge as the beginnings of a new whole… on the London Underground of all places.

I’d made it through Heathrow airport in one piece and was at this point on the tube winging my way through London. As I went to alight at Oxford Circus to change to the Victoria line an older gentleman attempted to get on the train at the same instant. There was a moment of sidestepping in unison, left then right, a lean back and a shimmy forward before I thought to myself, hold on passengers get off first, and slipped past him with my mid-sized duffle bug.

As I put the bag down on the platform it occurred to my jetlagged brain that perhaps the older man had not in fact been letting me off first and had been thinking age before youth, or more likely in London, screw you mate I’m going first.

So, nervous that I may have offended the man I turned around as the doors were closing to give the man a slight nod to show my appreciation or apologies.

Except I didn’t nod.

The head moved forward yes, but my neck didn’t so much as creak. The pivot had come from my waist.

I’d bloody well ojigi-ed (bowed) to the miserable old bugger.

Ok it was only a slight ojigi certainly but it was noticeably not a nod.

Two and a half years ago I’d barely scratched the surface here; I knew that. What I didn’t know was that Japan had not only scratched my surface it had damn well got under my skin, buried itself in my subconscious to the point where muscle memory if left unchecked would leave me bowing to poor defenseless Brits across the land.

However, uncontrolled and hopefully largely unobserved ojigi-ing is not the only symptom.

I’ll get to them in the next post.

In the meantime though, I may have found a cure while I was at home at least.

Simple yet effective.

I wonder if they serve it on British Airways?

The cure to what ales thee.

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Haneda Waiting

Posted on December 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

At this moment I’m at the airport.

Here since 10:00pm yesterday waiting for my 6:25am flight today. Experiencing first hand the joys of Haneda airport scheduling that doesn’t allow them to run international flights at the same time as Narita.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like the 6am departure time, what I’m not so fond of is the fact that it necessitates the use of a hotel room nearby or in my cheapskate case, the use of a bench to park myself on as I vainly try to ward off sleep until I’ve boarded my plane in some foolish attempt at avoiding jet-lag.

At least there’s free wifi.

Sparkly trees in Haneda Airport

Because it’s an airport Christmas… they’re probably lit up all year round.

It’s about 1:00am now and I’ve set up shop on the 5th floor of the airport.

It’s quiet up here; the rows of people sleeping across three seat benches are sleeping surprisingly quietly or watching DVDs on their laptops. Mercifully no loud, guttural snoring echoing on polished floors.

I’m across the hall by the windows. Typing quietly, slowly. Not my usual mad scientist, jazz pianist approach to typing.

There is however one noise that pierces the air at every moment.

The escalator with a split personality.

The escalator with two voices.

The English voice is calm, American, authoritative but dulcet. At least to my western, currently sleep deprived/soon to be jetlagged, ears. I assume the voice, despite being computerized in some fashion, to have at some point belonged to a beautiful woman. It sounds like someone I’d listen to instinctively. It exudes a certain sense of control, it gently reminds you of the danger you know to be part and parcel of motorized steps.

The Japanese voice sounds younger but that doesn’t mean much. Most Japanese women are in possession of the ability to shoot up a couple octaves when on the phone or if they happen to work in the service industry. It doesn’t sound authoritative, it sounds worried, somewhat cloying. Like a child reminding you that you promised to take them to Disneyland this weekend.

I wonder whether Japanese hear the same thing as I do. I wonder if I’d even hear it were I in possession of more sleep or something stronger than a bottle of green tea.

Is the cure to cloying, coffee?

I think it might just be… if only because the café is about 50ft from the closest escalator.

Edo Restaurant in an Airport

Either an Edo era restaurant inside an airport… or the dojo from Street Fighter.

But this is always a risk you run in Japan. The technology talks, it beeps, it whirs and it chimes. It attempts to lull you into a true sense of security through a casual barrage of unadulterated, undiluted Disney voices (excusing Donald’s voice, presumably they use that in prison though for a sense of commanding cuteness).

I typed too soon.

The snoring has begun, the lights have been turned up to a daybreak kind of glare and music is beginning to chime louder across the whole place.

Time to escape for that coffee I think, before Donald’s voice comes across the tannoy to inform me that the check-in desk is now open.

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