As I’ve written about before in these pages, there is “something ethereal, something dreamlike” about the Japanese Bon Odori festival which takes place typically in August every year. No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite capture its essence in any other form than my own mental wanderings. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to try and try again.

That chronicler of so many things Japanese at the turn of the century, Lafcadio Hearn (known to those in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo), wrote a beautiful essay about the Bon Odori that perhaps comes closest to capturing how this festival makes me feel (you can find it in the collection, Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, or here):

Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily this is enchantment; I am bewitched, bewitched by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flitting of the marvellous sleeves– apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this.

Even Hearn’s essay, through the voice of Akira, a young Buddhist acolyte accompanying Hearn, acknowledges that “you will see the Bon-odori danced here as it is never danced in cities–the Bon-odori of ancient days….[I]n the cities all is changed.”, and undoubtedly our local Bon Odori is even more removed from that which Hearn wrote about. It is as tacky and provincial as the cotton candy and tilt-a-whirls of my American childhood. But its charms are a part of the Japan I live in, a part of the Japan I never want to leave.

I have to confess I was not really aware of Sharp until I came across the event’s listing online, and although I did do the requisite YouTube research (this video is a good start — he played the same instrument last night) what attracted me to the event was the chance to see all the other musicians at the same time — you know, value for the yen and all. In addition to Sharp, some of the names that popped out at me were Michiyo Yagi (koto), Kazutoki Umezu (alto sax, clarinet), Yumiko Tanaka (shamisen) and Jim O’Rourke (guitar).

Unfortunately, because I decided on the event late, I wasn’t really able to get a seat near the front (The Pit Inn actually seats people based on when they bought/reserved their ticket, a fair system I wish other venues would implement, even though in this case it meant I was sitting near the back). That meant that it was primarily an aural experience for me, and on that score it was okay, but not great.

A friend to whom I mentioned that I was going to the show emailed me that he thought that with that many musicians it must be an improvised performance. In fact if wasn’t, “SyndaKit” being the name of Sharp’s composition that the ensemble played. How it worked was that each musician had what was a slightly different sheet of music, or perhaps more accurately, a different part of the composition. After the group would do a run through (the length of each run-through seemed to be in the hands of Sharp as performer and conductor), they would pass their sheet of music on to the player beside them, who would do the same. And so it went after each “session” or section of the piece. (Things got comical later since the crammed nature of the stage meant that there wasn’t really a nice circle formed, and later the sheet passing became more of sheet exchanging and was punctuated by many “No, I’ve already done this one” comments.)

Sharp made some comment early on that we would be hearing the same piece over and over again, but that it would be different each time, and he was certainly right about that. Later, when it got really chaotic with the sheet exchanging, he commented that he didn’t want to tell the musicians but in reality the sheets were not really needed after they had done the first run through since they were playing loops. I really have no idea what that means or if it was in fact true, but I thought the increasingly chaotic nature of the sheet exchanges added a lot to the performance. One thing that was interesting was how one performer (violinist Keisuke Ohta) at a couple of different points spoke into the mic something repetitive, such as “Ikebukuro” (the name of an area in Tokyo) 20 or so times. I would love to know what the score said there — did Sharp insert something topical like a place name, or were there instructions on the score to the effect of something like “repeat over and over again the first word that comes into your head”. And why was it that with all the sheet exchanging, the same performers ended up doing the same thing during another section of the piece? Coincidence?

In the end, it was probably these questions, as fascinating as they were, that gave the performance a slightly academic or contrived air and made the evening just okay for me. Not being able to really see the musicians, and wondering how much they were playing a part rather than expressing something near and dear to them, left me feeling slightly cold and unsatisfied.

I recorded a few minutes from one of the segments on my iPhone, so you can get a taste of the music (it runs 4:51):

I suppose this grumbling has something to do with poor internet connections and long load times — otherwise I can’t possibly see the problem. I for one, blessed with a decent cable internet connection, love the new look. Frankly I only ever used Image Search from time to time, but the new layout makes me want to use it a lot more, and even to spend idle time coming up with search terms quaranteed to produce serious visual stimulation.

The above “fillmore posters” search is one example. Another is the “blue note album covers” below.

Uh, no, I’m not in South Korea. What’s worse is that there doesn’t seem to be any where on the page where I can change it, at least not intuitively. Clicking on the Blizzard link takes you to Blizzard’s Korean page. Of course, being popped onto a Japanese page with no recourse to “English” would have been annoying too.

UPDATE: Found via Twitter a link to US purchase page. After signing up and everything, I get this:

“Because you live in Japan we have assigned you to this game region: North America”. The whole thing is rather shocking localization failure on the part of a major entertainment powerhouse. Their system couldn’t even accept the seven-digit Japanese postal code, so let’s see if my order goes through.

The other day I went over to the home of one of my students for a group lesson over lunch. A lesson over lunch is how this particular lesson has been carried out for over six years now — my longest standing private lesson “contract” as it were. However, the three to four students plus I usually meet (twice a month) at the same Chinese restaurant, eating lunch with general chit-chat for the first hour, and having a lesson over the second hour. But once in a while one of the students invites the group over to their house for lunch, and this was one of those occasions.

When these occasions come up, I have enough experience now to know not to eat anything for breakfast, and to tell my wife dinner won’t be necessary, since there is always an incredible amount of food, all of it delicious. And the student who prepared this particular lunch has a good friend who is vegetarian (of the strict variety, as opposed to the psuedo variety I belong to), so not only can I partake of all dishes, but she is quite creative when it comes to making things that normally would contain meat just as tasty without it.

A case in point were these little open sandwiches. The ones on the far left featured a slice or raw salmon over a bed of — actually I wasn’t sure what the spread was except that the whole thing was delicious. It turned out the intention was a spread of avocado, but the avocado she had was not the best. She saved the salvagable parts, and made a spread of avocado and banana mashed together. It tasted heavenly although I kind of wish she hadn’t shared how it got that way. (By the way, the black stuff on the second row of sandwiches is caviar from Mongolia, on top of scrambled egg.)

Besides the bountiful quantity of food, the other nice and guilt-inducing aspect of these lunches is that any pretense of a lesson is dispensed with as a matter of course. Not only that, but the Japanese to English speaking ratio — not very much in favor of English at the best of times — gets heavily tilted in the Japanese direction, so it basically becomes a Japanese listening and vocabulary lesson for me.

Some of the new words I learned on this day include:

酒豪　(しゅごう, shugou) — a heavy [hard] drinker. The English seems to have a negative tone, but the Japanese is used more to convey someone who can handle their liquor well.
しょっちゅう (shocchuu) — all the time; always. It always surprises me that I can still come across for the first time such seemingly indispensible, everyday words such as this one (although, given the late 60s/early 70s age of my students, it could well be that their vocabulary features words that have gone out of favor with a younger generation).
老婆心　(ろうばしん, roubashin) — kindness, goodwill. The word is made up of the Chinese characters for old, grandmother, and heart, respectively.

The main course (which came after five different “appetizers” that would have been plenty for lunch) was a “tomato nabe”. “nabe” is basically a hotpot dish of vegetables, tofu, fish, and/or meat, and comes in many varieties. However, I had never had a tomato-based nabe before. Little did I know that later when searching Google, it apparently is quite trendy at the moment (this Japan Probe post complete with a video from Japanese TV program should get you up to speed).

What we did after we had had our fill of the nabe ingredients (which included mushrooms, shrimp, red peppers, and scallops) was remove the uneaten ingredients and fill the pot with rice, parmesan cheese, a raw egg, and some parsley sprinkled on top — a kind of risotto. Not sure if that is part of the trendy tomato nabe being eaten by the young office lady set, or an added flourish from my student, but it was certainly delicious (for me, more so than the tomato nabe itself).

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Lance McCord under a Creative Commons license.

I finally switched to the Mac platform earlier this year, buying a new (at that time) iteration of the iMac line. On the whole very pleased with the new way of life, though of course there have been many hiccups and annoyances along the way (not least in part because I’m still on Windows XP at work).

One of the things I love is that I can keep a bunch of applications open, go for a week without restarting, then open Photoshop or something similarly bloated, and it still reacts quickly. I realize that were I to buy a new Core i7 Windows PC perhaps the same should apply, but my PC experience tells me that Windows just isn’t good at clearing out stuff from memory even after the application is closed. Anyway, I love not rebooting for weeks on end.

However, when I do reboot, an annoyance with my iMac comes to the fore — the iMac I have always starts up with the screen set at its brightest point, even though when I shut down or restart it was at its dimmest point. In other words, the system isn’t remembering my monitor brightness setting. I sort of assumed this would be addressed in a OS update but to date some 6 months later it hasn’t (not on Snow Leopard yet, not sure that would fix it but I kind of doubt it). At any rate, since I don’t reboot that often, not a big deal.

However, recently I’ve realized that even keeping the iMac at it’s dimmest setting is still too bright. I’ve had a couple of freelance jobs of late that have required me to spend long hours in front of the computer (this on top of what is normal for me, which is probably too long as it is), and my eyes are feeling the strain. The way my home office is laid out (practically, unchangeable since the desk is built into the room), I can’t put the device any further away from me. Recently I went in search of some kind of anti-glare device, not liking the idea of draping something over an admittedly sleek form factor but not seeing any other choice.

What I didn’t figure on was that there were software solutions to solve or alleviate the brightness problem — nor did I figure on the fact that this is a common complaint among iMac users. The solution I stumbled onto has proven to be very elegant — Shades, a freeware application from Charcoal in the UK. Shades is very simple, it installs into your system preferences, and gives you a little “menulet” or Menu Extra at the top of your screen — you know, where the small icons for things like Time Machine, Bluetooth, Wireless and Spotlight are (other options for displaying the slider exist). Click on it and you get a vertical slider that allows you to adjust the brightness as a percentage of what your System Preferences brightness setting is. Voila, now I can dim the monitor to a lot lower (higher?) level than I previously could.

Needless to say if I’m working on a Photoshop file or seriously viewing someone’s photography on the screen, I will brighten the display, but for most other applications — like typing this post right now — I need the screen to be easier on the eyes. Being able to adjust this with Shades, without the need for some clunky plasticky thing hanging over my beautiful display, or some film-like stick-on thing I wouldn’t be able to affix properly, is the perfect (so far) solution, especially since glare itself is not a problem in my environment.

In the process of resurrecting this blog I upgraded WordPress from something like 2.2 to 2.8.6. However, when I finally got around to making a post, all of a sudden I no longer had the ability to post in Japanese. All the Japanese I typed in the WP admin interface for new posts would turn into a series of question marks upon saving, and appear live on the site in the same way.

To fix I first tried following the step-by-step instructions found at a well-referenced post at Japan It Up which explains how to go into one’s SQL database and changing those fields that have Collation to something other than “utf8_unicode_ci”. This turned out to be quite a few, over several databases — rather tedious. And it didn’t work a bit. Japanese was still being rendered as a series of question marks.

More googling turned up a post at WordPress Support Forums suggesting removing or commenting out the

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

line in the “wp-config.php” file. Seemed counterintuitive to the OP and to me as well, but I tried it and lo and behold, I can once again type Japanese with no problems.

Have no idea if I needed to do the first thing in order for the second to work, or only doing the second thing would have been enough. But hopefully this post will help someone similarly stuck.

For a while there, I was having bad memories of the early-ish days of (my) blogging with Movable Type when there was no easy way to input Japanese nor have it rendered properly.

Anyway, I was in search of a Tenya (a cheap tempura chain) which I had been to once before, but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, I ran into this rather startling site — the Jimbocho Theater, which is owned by the publishing house Shogakukan (“Magazine and book publication, etc., including 66 magazines, 9,000 books, 13,200 comics, 850 mooks and 5,000 videos and DVDs (as of 2006)”) according to their English website. Apparently it opened in 2007, though hell if I knew.

Of course, this being Tokyo, right opposite on one side was this scene of corrugated tin and vending machines. You win some, you lose some.

On view at the moment is a season of old Japanese films called 日本文芸散歩 (nihon bungei sanpo, or literally, “Japan Literary Walk”). Looking over the films listed on the theater’s site, the movies date from between 1939 (the biopic 樋口一葉 (higuchi ichiyou) about the Meiji-era novelist Ichiyou Higuchi) to 1986 (Kinji Fukasaku’s 火宅の人 (Kataku no hito, “House on Fire”)), and are divided into four thematic groupings like “Writers in the Landscape” and “Student’s Tokyo”. Some of the directors featured, besides Fukasaku, include Kon Ichikawa, Yasuzo Masumura, and Nagisa Oshima. Looking down the list of films and film stills brings back many a fond art-house memory, and a regret my Japanese is still not at a point where I could truly appreciate these.

Lead architect for the theater building was Nikken Sekkei. The exterior was supplied by Takahashi Kogyo, a company with roots in the shipbuilding industry (read this inspiring interview with the founder, a 7th-generation shipbuilder). World Buildings Directory has more background and information about the building. And lots more photos at Got Arch?

On the way to work I read “The Bible” by Marguerite Duras. I don’t have much intelligent to say about the story itself except that I liked it, and I marveled that I could feel as if I knew the female character completely in the space of two pages (the male character less so, but he was more a symbol of something, a foil for a shoe store clerk). I mentally dragged my highlighting pen over this passage:

In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them.

But more than the story itself I found myself thinking about the short story, and how much I love the form. Short stories are like traveling on a puddle-jumping airplane: when the journey is over, you think “wow that was quick” but all the same, you are in a different place than when you started.

Short stories appeal to my sense that it is impossible to tell the whole story, so why even try.

On the way home I read (or rather started — I finished it at home) “My Father’s Suitcase,” by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist. This isn’t a short story but rather the text of a 2006 Nobel Lecture (available online here). Though a speech, it reads like an essay — another beloved form.

This piece is wonderful and beautiful in so many nuanced ways — about father and son, and about writing, and books. A paragraph toward the end about why he writes, too long to quote in full here, could easily stand in for my own sentiments, with the change of a few words here and there:

I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone….I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Earlier, Pamuk writes about journeys and traveling:

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people’s stories and books.

Physically I traveled there and back. My material self was grateful for the security of the home I left in the morning and returned to in the evening, and for the salary earned in between.

Spiritually I got on a one-way train this morning and for this I’m grateful to the writers in question, and for coming to them via an American magazine found in a Japanese bookstore and costing less than a dollar.