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Random re: Japan finds

Some random finds, all Japan-related:

Japanese all-women punk band Gito Gito Hustler. MP3 or Real Audio files here. Found via Yakitori!, itself a new find. As best I can make out Yakitori! is a blog originating from somewhere in Tokyo. Mainly just links.

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George, a fan of my photo diary, alerted me to another site of Tokyo photos, TOMATOCOW, by Koichi Morita. Some nice stuff therein. I particularly enjoyed the series of shots of Shibuya at night. He also has a blog of sorts (see the “Scribble” link).

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A wonderful post from always-erudite Jonathon Delacour on the art of asking questions to Japanese.

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My brother Kimo alerted me to Ruin-Japan a few weeks ago, a collection of photographs and online exhibits (including always-engaging Quicktime VR’s) of various abandoned Japanese hotels and buildings. See their links page for more sites of this type (most of them Japanese). This site I found particularly haunting.

(This reminds me, I need to ride my bike over to the “love hotel” nearby and do some photography there. It isn’t abandoned (yet?!) but sure looks like it, especially in the daytime when it sticks out like a sore thumb among the tiny rice fields surrounding it and its porthole-style architecture makes it look like it belongs at the Salton Sea.)

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Speaking of architecture that hasn’t been ruined yet, view a fascinating display of the tallest buildings in Tokyo courtesy of SkyscraperPage.com (found via What Do I Know). I was amused that No. 40 on this list, measuring in at 120 meters tall, is not a building at all, but rather the Ushiku Buddha statue in Ibaraki prefecture, which I visited during my trip last year.

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On the urban topography theme, Mid-Tokyo Maps is a fascinating site from the Mori Building Co.. These maps however are not your usual guidebook variety, but rather a collection of sociological maps “illustrating the problems and potential of re-making Tokyo into a thriving, attractive and internationally competitive city”.

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September 11 and hijacked grief

Yesterday I went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. On display, among other exhibits, was “New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers.” This exhibit or a variation thereof is currently on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., and will soon be traveling to other US cities. There is also a book that has been published.

I have to admit that I was hardly moved by the images, as powerful as the photos admittedly are and as much as they brought back that day in my memory. I reflected on why it was that I was so unmoved by the exhibit, and it didn’t take long for me to find the answer. It has to do with the fact that I was never allowed or given any space within which to process the tragic event in the days — no, hours — after it occurred.

As I looked at the photos, what came back to my mind of that day more clearly than anything else was remembering Sen. John McCain, on some news program I forget which though it hardly matters as they were all the same, being interviewed by telephone and hearing him say “I consider this an act of war.” It must have been 2 – 3 hours after the second WTC tower was hit, and it was the first mention of “war” I heard that day though hardly the last, nor as it turns out, was this utterance to remain in the realm of the rhetorical.

The next day or so — or was it the same day, it is all blurred now — came the CNN and co. miniseries-style titles for their news programs: “America at War,” “America’s New War,” ad infinitum and nauseum, beating the warpath drums in lockstep rhythm to the Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft war dance. Soon thereafter flags on anchor lapels echoed (or helped usher in?) Americans putting flags on their cars (ironically appropriate) and just about anywhere else.

In short, what I reflected on as I looked at Steve McCurry’s photo of the WTC towers on fire, or David Alan Harvey’s photo of the New York Fire Department chaplain Michael Judge in a casket, or of Thomas Hoepker’s photo of a candlelight vigil, was that my grief, my period of mourning, was hijacked by politicians and warmongers and a pathetically unfree press all too eager to stoke revenge from the burning embers of “Ground Zero”.

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One thing that bothered me about the photos was the unmistakably clear liberal bias of the exhibit. While there were the requisite photos of American flags or “I Love NY” imagery, there was also the inclusion of not one but four photos showing various demonstrations for the “war is not the answer” (to quote a placard in one of the photos) position, including not surprisingly a couple by Susan Meiselas. While that has more of less been my position since 9/11, I think it’s safe to say that certainly in the days after 9/11, it was a decidedly minority position, and definitely not a position that one would encounter in mainstream media. Of course demonstrations of this sort existed, and they were documented. However, the inclusion of four images documenting antiwar protests (out of a total of 35 in the “After (9/11)” section) is evidence of the liberal bias of Magnum and undermines the “documentary tradition” they claim to represent.