Pieces and bits
Gillian, wanderer and English teacher at large, only calls home after a catastrophe, after deaths - so after Doctor Death from Bundaberg hit the news, she hit the phones hard, tutting and mmm'ing to friends in Australia, dissecting the case - those Indian doctors, she says, and shakes her head darkly. After the London bombings, euphoria in her eyes - an Event, tragedy, terror! - and she calls her friends in London, remembering when she lived ten metres from the place where a bus turned itself inside out, made modern sculpture out of flesh and metal and bone and grievance, became the new battlefront of the Iraq war removed from abstraction and sandy wastes.
---
Why I love Japan, chapter 10: for the nighttime, for the neon, for the pulse in the air you can feel. Last night, Row and I roped in a few of our friends from the kindergarten and found our way to an Okinawan bar, tenth floor overlooking the dark futurism of Shinsaibashi, shimmering neon against backdrop of black buildings with red lights flashing at each corner, warning planes, speaking of machine intelligence. The bar reeked of paint; opening night, a place we found by chance. A man surrounded by women, he with open face and greying hair. His entourage whisper to us that he is perhaps the most famous musician in Osaka, and he lets them herald his coming before coming over and talking to us. A song comes on, his voice at 28 years old, when he first hit the charts, and he sings along with it quietly, his 50-year-old voice acting as gravelly counterpoint to his youth and fame. His wife leaves with her friends and five minutes later, his new lover comes in, toting unrealistic breasts, a face lit up by proximity to fame, her fingernails long and wonderfully wrought, shining as she lays them gently over his arm. They met two nights ago. As for us, we drank and laughed, taking pleasure in being young in this country; we are met with smiles and warmth in a shared place. In Osakan bars, no one is a stranger for long. Row and G were having Relationship Woes and their eyes glazed under the weight of a lethal spirit from Okinawa and they spilled themselves out for Jeremy and I and everything was exactly as it should have been and I didn't want to leave Japan. Yesterday, I was wondering how, exactly, I came to be in drab Osaka, rather than in Tokyo, the World Class City and for a while I felt as if I needed to be defensive about this. But while Tokyo is gloss and shine, Osaka is gritty concrete and friendliness, remarkable food and welcoming bars. Afterwards, walking through Dotombori Arcade, I spotted some Eastern European or Russian hostesses, tall, sultry, walking, not together but associated with men with wallets, cashing in on their youth and beauty before it runs out, afterwards, I saw sleek suit-clad young men spruiking hostess bars, afterwards I saw a gaggle of workers in hardhats and their trademark flared pants, drinking one-cup shochu next to their building site, afterwards we laughed and joked until it was time for home.
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Shops here display the dreams of their owners on the outsides, promising happiness for the customer, talking of the roots from which the shop came, but this dreaming is in English and not in Japanese. Girls wear t-shirts with blatant come-ons - "Maybe I'll want to, just ask me" - but they are all in English, which means they are safe. I suppose English is the language of dreaming for the rest of the world which lives in other languages, English is the upwardly mobile language, an access point.
---
Jobless, I spent much of last week taking my parents on Tourist Voyages of Discovery, most of which were bad. After leaving yet another historically important temple swamped by tourists equally as ignorant as us, I started wondering why, exactly, people travel at all as tourists. Anytime something is designated as an Important Attraction and the crowds and giftshops start rolling in, the original attraction is lost and all that is left is a place to mill in, to feel the angst and dissatisfaction of people who have paid money to get here and be here and must therefore pretend that they are interested in what they are seeing. If you have seen one waterfall, you have seen all waterfalls; one temple and you have seen them all. Everything is better in the official photos and words, and you come to see for yourself and take your own photos and make your own words, none of which come near the gloss of the brochure. Mass tourism kills what people come to see and resurrects it as an ideal of what we want to see - difference. So Kyoto's historical districts have roads newly paved in old stones, have new shops in old buildings, to give the illusion of difference and worth. Maybe we travel to take photos home, ways to prove to others and outselves that home isn't so bad after all, to settle that disquiet that other people have got a better thing going - the same thrill offered by reality television. The things we genuinely enjoyed were where our ideas of daily life differed with Japanese practice - staying in a Japanese inn and trying to locate our futons; drinking cold tea from vending machines, eating glorious sashimi and gluggy, savoury udon in izakayas, catching buses and trains, skindiving amidst soft corals and different fish, but the designated Main Activities, the things that tourists are Obliged To Do, most of these should be of interest to specialists and not we plebs, specialists who know the significance of this religious art, historians, religious, culturephiles. Mass tourism is the popularisation of things which most of us are not equipped/inclined towards as the rationale to justify leaving home. This is evil and should be stopped. Here endeth the sermon.
Gillian, wanderer and English teacher at large, only calls home after a catastrophe, after deaths - so after Doctor Death from Bundaberg hit the news, she hit the phones hard, tutting and mmm'ing to friends in Australia, dissecting the case - those Indian doctors, she says, and shakes her head darkly. After the London bombings, euphoria in her eyes - an Event, tragedy, terror! - and she calls her friends in London, remembering when she lived ten metres from the place where a bus turned itself inside out, made modern sculpture out of flesh and metal and bone and grievance, became the new battlefront of the Iraq war removed from abstraction and sandy wastes.
---
Why I love Japan, chapter 10: for the nighttime, for the neon, for the pulse in the air you can feel. Last night, Row and I roped in a few of our friends from the kindergarten and found our way to an Okinawan bar, tenth floor overlooking the dark futurism of Shinsaibashi, shimmering neon against backdrop of black buildings with red lights flashing at each corner, warning planes, speaking of machine intelligence. The bar reeked of paint; opening night, a place we found by chance. A man surrounded by women, he with open face and greying hair. His entourage whisper to us that he is perhaps the most famous musician in Osaka, and he lets them herald his coming before coming over and talking to us. A song comes on, his voice at 28 years old, when he first hit the charts, and he sings along with it quietly, his 50-year-old voice acting as gravelly counterpoint to his youth and fame. His wife leaves with her friends and five minutes later, his new lover comes in, toting unrealistic breasts, a face lit up by proximity to fame, her fingernails long and wonderfully wrought, shining as she lays them gently over his arm. They met two nights ago. As for us, we drank and laughed, taking pleasure in being young in this country; we are met with smiles and warmth in a shared place. In Osakan bars, no one is a stranger for long. Row and G were having Relationship Woes and their eyes glazed under the weight of a lethal spirit from Okinawa and they spilled themselves out for Jeremy and I and everything was exactly as it should have been and I didn't want to leave Japan. Yesterday, I was wondering how, exactly, I came to be in drab Osaka, rather than in Tokyo, the World Class City and for a while I felt as if I needed to be defensive about this. But while Tokyo is gloss and shine, Osaka is gritty concrete and friendliness, remarkable food and welcoming bars. Afterwards, walking through Dotombori Arcade, I spotted some Eastern European or Russian hostesses, tall, sultry, walking, not together but associated with men with wallets, cashing in on their youth and beauty before it runs out, afterwards, I saw sleek suit-clad young men spruiking hostess bars, afterwards I saw a gaggle of workers in hardhats and their trademark flared pants, drinking one-cup shochu next to their building site, afterwards we laughed and joked until it was time for home.
---
Shops here display the dreams of their owners on the outsides, promising happiness for the customer, talking of the roots from which the shop came, but this dreaming is in English and not in Japanese. Girls wear t-shirts with blatant come-ons - "Maybe I'll want to, just ask me" - but they are all in English, which means they are safe. I suppose English is the language of dreaming for the rest of the world which lives in other languages, English is the upwardly mobile language, an access point.
---
Jobless, I spent much of last week taking my parents on Tourist Voyages of Discovery, most of which were bad. After leaving yet another historically important temple swamped by tourists equally as ignorant as us, I started wondering why, exactly, people travel at all as tourists. Anytime something is designated as an Important Attraction and the crowds and giftshops start rolling in, the original attraction is lost and all that is left is a place to mill in, to feel the angst and dissatisfaction of people who have paid money to get here and be here and must therefore pretend that they are interested in what they are seeing. If you have seen one waterfall, you have seen all waterfalls; one temple and you have seen them all. Everything is better in the official photos and words, and you come to see for yourself and take your own photos and make your own words, none of which come near the gloss of the brochure. Mass tourism kills what people come to see and resurrects it as an ideal of what we want to see - difference. So Kyoto's historical districts have roads newly paved in old stones, have new shops in old buildings, to give the illusion of difference and worth. Maybe we travel to take photos home, ways to prove to others and outselves that home isn't so bad after all, to settle that disquiet that other people have got a better thing going - the same thrill offered by reality television. The things we genuinely enjoyed were where our ideas of daily life differed with Japanese practice - staying in a Japanese inn and trying to locate our futons; drinking cold tea from vending machines, eating glorious sashimi and gluggy, savoury udon in izakayas, catching buses and trains, skindiving amidst soft corals and different fish, but the designated Main Activities, the things that tourists are Obliged To Do, most of these should be of interest to specialists and not we plebs, specialists who know the significance of this religious art, historians, religious, culturephiles. Mass tourism is the popularisation of things which most of us are not equipped/inclined towards as the rationale to justify leaving home. This is evil and should be stopped. Here endeth the sermon.
posted by Doug @ 7/10/2005 01:47:00 pm
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