Japan, May/June 2008
Monday, May 26
I have been here for a week
now.
This week
has flown by.
Instantly.
The writing of it has taken quite a while - and I suppose that the
reading of it is no small task - but the living of it seemed to
have gone by in a blink.
Something that I wanted to do at some point
was
to get out of Tokyo and do a day trip somewhere (other than the week in
Kyoto, coming up soon).
Mount Fuji was an obvious choice, and I had
also read the following about the industrial city of Chiba:
“When you think of wilderness hikes, Chiba isn’t usually the first
place that comes to mind. But a relaxing nature experience– complete
with trail walking, outdoor cooking and even camping–is just a short
train ride east of Tokyo. In the hills of Uchiurayama, you can do all
of these things on the cheap. The area enjoys a relatively mild
year-round temperature. Few places I know offer a good hike through a
lush, isolated mountain trail, have a 360m gain in elevation, and
provide scintillating ocean views. What Uchiurayama really has going
for it is how well laid-out and user friendly it is. Easily accessible
by train and car, the area is free to enter. There is a helpful
visitor’s center where you can pick up a complimentary map and study a
diorama of the area.”
Neither Chiba nor Mount Fuji panned out
(Fuji trips are rather expensive!).
I did venture down to Yokohama, though.
It took 45 minutes on the JR train to get there.
Other than investigating two more leads for my Tiki Magazine
article, I didn’t really have much of a plan for activities.
I figured
I’d wing it...
A short walk south from the JR Yokohama
station will bring you to a newly minted mall called Bay Quarter (in
English!). It is
built to look like a cruise ship, and it is parked right next to a
river that feeds into Yokohama Bay. Inside, everything is new and
blindingly white. Most of the people whom I saw in there on a Monday
afternoon were the Japanese equivalent of yuppie women in their
twenties, pushing strollers. This reminded me that I did not really see
many babies or strollers in Tokyo. I saw some, of course
(especially groups of school kids in the parks), but the ratio
of kids to adults seemed rather smaller than expected.
Bay Quarter mall is the motherlode for modern
day
Japanese looking to relive their vacation to Waikiki circa 2008. Among
other things are a store called Hula Hawaii, a cafe also called Hula
Hawaii,
a malasada shop (¥150 each; didn’t get one), the Kuaaina sandwich
shop, a Kahala Nuts cart, and my destination: a restaurant called Aloha
Table.
It is on the top floor of the mall, and features a nice patio
overlooking the river.
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My
lunch there was pleasant and inexpensive. I
had a Hawaiian dish called teriyaki loco moco (¥950), which ought
to be familiar to anyone who has been to Honolulu. Teriyaki
chicken served over rice with a fried egg plopped on top. It came
with a small
salad and access to a self-serve beverage bar (including water, fruit
juice,
tea, pop, and wine) plus miso soup.
There were almost no men in the place when I
visited, just women with women, or women with babies, or women with
women and babies. They were all enjoying the wine and sunshine on the
patio, spending
the old man’s cash on a Monday afternoon.
There is also some awesome Engrish in this
mall, such as two restaurants called The Freshness Dog Cafe, and Ask A
Giraffe.
I saw a huge Sogo department store across the
water, with a bridge connecting it to Bay Quarter. There are no
bookstores in the mall (like their counterparts in the West, yuppies in
Japan apparently can’t read), so I hiked to the department store to
check out their seventh floor book section, with the idea of finding a
travel guide to Yokohama.
I did, and it pointed me to their art museum.
OK, what the hell, another art museum.
I am an art whore, and I don’t plan to change.
There is a water taxi system in Yokohama called
Sea Bass. I found that for ¥400, I could take a boat from Bay
Quarter to a big modern convention center right on the bay, within an
area called
Minato
Mirai 21. It would be an easy walk to the museum from there.
Looking at
a map, I saw that walking the entire way from Bay Quarter to the museum
would have been about 1/5th the physical distance compared to taking
the boat, but the boat seemed like more fun. But since it was Monday,
would
the museum even be open?
Who knows. Let’s take a boat ride.
The water route took us (“us” being three crew members and about
eight passengers) around a big peninsula mainly dominated by heavy
industry. If the view of the shore was a bit ugly, at least the weather
was nice, and it was pleasant to be out on the water.
The boat ride was
a good idea.
Attrition:
The AVR (Automatic Voice Recording) button of my tape recorder is
now missing. Snapped off somewhere. Otherwise, the recorder seems to
function normally. The newly disabled feature is one that I didn’t use
anyway.
By the way, I carry around a discreet man-purse when I travel
(it is flat and can be worn under a jacket, like a shoulder holster!),
and it contains the old-skool microcassette recorder, a flat and slim
camera, travel notes and maps,
business cards, chapstick, bandaids, pens, batteries, flask of rum
(evenings only), and
passport. The one I bought for Paris (late 2007) was already falling
apart by this point, halfway into its second journey. Lame. No
cell phone - it wouldn't work here anyway.
Anyway...
There were thousands of bicycles, mopeds, scooters, and
motorcycles lined up in front of the convention center by the Sea Bass
dock. There were almost no people around, but signs all over town
indicated that some sort of convention that had something to do with
Africa was going on. I noticed that there was not much car traffic at
all. The same was actually true in Tokyo. For a metropolis of twelve
million people, you’d think that the traffic would dwarf that of, say,
Manhattan. But really, these people have wised up and realized that for
the urbanite, cars suck. Riding a bike or a scooter or the
subway is
just a better idea, most of the time. Saves money, helps both
control pollution and oil consuption, and keeps a person healthy.
Win-win-win.
Arriving at the Yokohama Museum of Art, I thought
that my fears had been confirmed and that it was closed. As was the
case with the convention center, there was almost no one milling around
outside.
It was open.
And mostly deserted inside.
Compared to Tokyo, Yokohama seemed to be a ghost town.
For ¥900, I got a ticket to both the special
exhibition and the permanent collection.
The
special exhibition was by Kinoshita Takanori
(1894-1973). He
is considered to be important because he was one of the first Japanese
people to go to Paris to study European art. He brought back Western
styles of painting and drawing.
Japanese museums still segregate
paintings, drawings, sculptures, etc. (even works by Japanese artists)
into “Japanese art” and “Western-style art”. Takanori was basically
among the first successful Japanese artists working in the Western
style. To my eye, he seemed influenced a lot by Hopper’s (few)
portraits, or by the handful of Hopper works that included things like
women lounging around lazily in hotel rooms. I also detected a fair
amount of Balthus influence, but perhaps a bit rougher in style and
with less sensitivity to his subjects than Balthus. He rejected the Surrealists and Dada movements,
but was influenced by Fauvism, which is evident in some of his early
work.
Oddly, Takanori
also did a bunch of nudes that are surprisingly lowbrow, reminding me
of the so-called “bar room nudes” seen hanging above the bar in 19th
century taverns (below).
Barroom
nude by Don Rust (left), fine art by Takanori (right). Where is
the line
between art and kitsch?
Takanori’s work also ranges widely in
quality. He produced some
delicate and rather sensitive portraits, but he also
did
some works - even in his middle and later years - that are
embarrassingly amateurish. Check out the rubbery legs on this Degas
influenced
ballerina painting (to the right). I do not believe
that the miserably
poor rendering was an artistic choice in this case; I think that he
just didn’t have a grip on the anatomy, or he was in a hurry, or he was
just letting quality slip for a moment. He can do, and has done,
better.
It is also fascinating how some of his portraits of Western
women have their eyes set rather far apart, a common trait in Japanese
women (to the left).
Like every other museum in Japan, the permanent
collection here is relatively small, and the temporary exhibitions are
the focus. The permanent collection in Yokohama rocks, however. The
size is not what matters, it is what you do with it. This is a
collection heavy on the first half of the 20th century, with all of the
important European artists of that era represented. An assortment of
Japanese artists working in the Western style are mixed in. I
made a ton of notes and snapped a lot of pics (totally allowed,
rockin’).
A few highlights:
The first trio of rooms begin with a photo gallery featuring top
works by Man Ray, Brassai, Bresson,
Andre Kertesz, Doisneu, and Lartigue.
I
also noted pencil works by Hasegawa Kayoshi (late 1920s to 1930s) and
paintings by Gustave Moreau (the tiny Goddess on Rock, 1890...
“Goddess” was spelt wrong on the info tag), Symbolist painting by Jean
Paul Laurens (Dernier Trone Carolingien), and art by Arp,
Kandisky, Man Ray objects, an interesting painting of Edgar Allen Poe
by Grosz from
1918, and an Otto Dix (Still Life with Calf Head, 1926).
And then comes the
motherlode: a big round room full of great
surrealist art, lit from above by natural light.
Represented
here are strong works by
many of my favorite artists:
de Chirico, Arp, Tanguy, Delvaux, and two by Ernst. None of the
paintings are second rate offerings by any means; this is a really
solid
collection. But the cherry on the
top of it all is a triptych by Salvador Dali, painted in his prime: Fantastic
Landscape: Dawn, Heroic Noon, Evening (1942). Three square panels,
each about eight feet on a side. This mammoth masterpiece is not even
behind glass, and there is no rope or barrier keeping the viewer from
getting up good and close to study it. I have seen images of this
triptych previously (as in my copy of Robert Descharnes’ definitive
two-volume Dali: The Paintings from Taschen), but I did not
realize how huge it was. The level of detail is amazing, and cannot be
truly understood in a reproduction shrunk down to fit into a book.
Since the paintings were not under glass, I was able to take a bunch of
great quality close-up images of the details, each section of which
could have been a strong and vital separate painting. Out of control.
A Dali sculpture (Homage a Newton, 1969) and a De Chirico
sculpture (Ettore e Andromaca, 1973) sit in the center of the
room.
There are a few lesser works here as well: a Matta, a Masson, an
Oscar Dominguez,
and finally two works by my least favorite surrealist, Magritte
(I find his work to be trite and obvious; surrealism dumbed down for
the masses).
Beyond that is an
open area with three different comfortable lounging areas. The space
looks like it is an art installation, and it is, but visitors are
encouraged to sit on the furniture (or on the Japanese tatami
mats on the floor), and read some of the art books scattered around.
A
great Francis Bacon painting hangs in the center of it all. As is the
case in almost all 20th century art museums, the Bacon is in its own
area; although he was one of the greats of the mid-century (and beyond)
his work does not fit in with any style or movement. Just six
months prior, I noticed that a Bacon work was similarly segregated at
the Pompidou Center in Paris. I guess curators just don't know what to
do with the guy.
Ambient music was also playing in this
area.
Each time I walked by, I noticed a melodic fragment that reminded
me of Jerry Goldsmith’s 1979 score for the original Alien
film. This is my second and final refrence to that film in this
piece of writing... however, Kiss will reemerge, and the band XTC will
appear twice as well.
We continue!
Next were a terraced
sculpture garden containing more Dali, Miro, Zadkine, and many others,
and a gallery of contemporary Japanese artists working in traditional
styles. I liked the contrast between two works by Yamamura Koka: Girl
(1935) is a Western-style portrait of a girl in 1930s Western dress,
and Cucumber
Vines (1932) is a six-panel Japanese screen with watercolor vines
painted on them.
Some ukiyo-e here includes Hashiguchi Goyo’s After
The Bath and Woman in Summer Clothes, both from 1920, and
Utagawa (Tsukioka) Yoshitoshi’s Looks Wake Up Well and Looks
Cool, both from the series Thirty-two Aspects of Costumes and
Manners (1888), plus Wisteria and Carps from 1889. Then,
Kobiyashi Kiyochika’s View of the Umaya Bridge, Summer
Night at Asakusa Karamae, and Wisteria Blossoms at Kamaido.
Any of these eight works are better and more satisfying than anything I
saw at the Ota Memorial
Museum (supposedly the place to go for ukiyo-e) on Sunday.
I found it
interesting that the Japanese works are in dimly lit and climate
controlled
rooms, and are preserved behind glass, whereas the priceless Western
works in the previous room are just sort of slapped up on the wall,
where they can be damaged by dust, temperature, dumb people trying to
touch them, and cooties or bad breath jumping off of your stinky gaijin
body.
National pride.
The museum wrapped
up with a fairly large photography exhibit. The first part are World
War II photos, taken all over Europe (Poland, Italy, France), most of
them showing the unpleasantness and suffering caused by the aftermath
of fighting. The bulk of the gallery is made up of a wide array of
photographic Americana by a who’s who of American photographers: Arbus,
Weegee,
Winogrand, Frank, Klein, Cappa, Ben Shaun. What amazed me about
the exhibit is that many Japanese people who will never visit America
are going to have their conception of the U.S. of A. partially molded
by
these photos. The pictures basically paint a collective portrait of
Americans as being insane. There are
transvestites, hermaphrodites,
criminals, murder, guns, violence, monkeys, crowds of people behaving
badly, and general fucking freaks. I remember Emi being honestly
surprised when she learned that I do not personally own an
airplane.
This educated and bright thirty-something woman honestly thought that
all Americans do. How severely warped is the image of American culture
from the perspective of the rest of world?
This exhibit of photography shows us
as being absolute lunatics.
I picked up
the Kinoshita Takanori catalog in
the gift shop, and poked my head into the museum library, which is free
to peruse, even if you don’t buy a museum ticket. Very cool. The young
librarian woman spoke English well, and gave me more help and
information
than I wanted or needed.
The Yokohama Museum of Art
is right across the
street from the Yokohama Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan.
From the perspective of someone who lives in a city that is home to
the Sears tower, and is in fact the town where the skyscraper was
invented, the Landmark Tower isn’t actually all that tall, and I am
sure that Japanese engineers could make them much taller if they wanted
to. But of course they have earthquakes to worry about. This limits the
height compared to something you’d see in New York or Chicago. They
wanted ¥1000 to ride an elevator to the top, and I had already been
to the top
of a building almost as tall (for free) in Shinjuku, so I passed.
Be careful going through
doors...
I
left the Minato Mirai 21 area and decided to
walk back towards the train station. Although this part of Yokohama
seems to be modern and well maintained, the streets were almost
deserted, in stark contrast to just about any part of Tokyo.
About
halfway back to the station, I noticed a lot of people lined up to get
into some sort of concert or event. A lot of them had bags or shirts
decorated with the logo for that African convention that I had seen
upon getting off of the boat. Most of them also had red, yellow, and
black scarves on (in 90 degree heat) with what appeared to be Italian
writing on them? They were mostly younger people and I gathered
that
there was some sort of benefit concert going on, perhaps to send aid to
Africa. The line was really long - maybe a half-mile! I was walking on
the same side of the street as the line but in the opposite direction.
The thousands of Japanese people lined up to get into this show had
nothing better to do than to stare back at the curious gaijin.
As
the sun began to set, painting the sky purple,
I walked across a bridge, took a picture of the river, and then arrived
back to the train station. I passed through it, and went out the other
side to get to my dinner destination, Tiki Tiki.
This restaurant is
owned by the same people who created the restaurant of the same name in
Shinjuku. The menu, food, and drinks were identical, but the small
floor show was a bit
less ridiculous than at the other location (at least the beautiful
waitresses/dancers were in sarongs here, rather than in jeans as in
Shinjuku). Outside on the street, I had been given a coupon for
¥1000
off of my bill. Being rush hour, there were lots of people at the
corner near the train station, handing out coupons for various
eateries. Inside, I was told that my coupon was only good for couples
dining together. But then the manager came over and gave me
another
coupon, and this one was apparently good for bachelors. With the
coupon, I enjoyed an appetizer, an entree, and a drink for only
¥1520.
There was no charge for the show at this location (unlike the
Shinjuku store). Finally - a freaking bargain in this country!
My drink was a Hummingbird (peach liqueur, orange
juice, and some vile Suntory-brand white rum).
Look for more on Tiki
Tiki and Aloha Table in the summer 2008 issue of Tiki Magazine.
The dangers of Mah Jong...
Yokohama - the second
largest city in
Japan -
seemed no different from Tokyo, and without much information on how
late the trains would be running, I headed back to Tokyo rather early.
There was yet another
destination on my
magazine
article to-do list, a place called Kuroitsuki (or Black Moon, at 3F,
33-10 Udagawacho, Shibuya-ku). The person who told me about this place
told me that it was on the third floor of an otherwise completely
nondescript building, and that the door to the bar had no signs on it
whatsoever. It was supposedly just a plain copper door in a
cramped and
tiny cinderblock hallway on the third floor of another of the endless
identical Tokyo office buildings.
When I had met Emi in Shibuya, so long ago it seems, she took one
look at the address and declared that we would never find the
place.
This is from a Tokyo native! At any other point in the week, I
would
have not been up for the quest, but I felt like it was time for a
supreme test of one of my stronger travel skills: my ability to find
anything, anywhere, and to never get truly lost no matter where I
am.
Shibuya is not far from my hotel, so it seemed like a fun mission for
the night. It was more about the challenge of finding this place
than
any intense need to visit yet another overpriced Tokyo cocktail bar.
Long story short, I
had all but found
the place
when
I finally gave in and asked two Japanese girls working in a
French-style bakery for directions. After some head scratching by my
French-Japanese teenage helpers, I was directed to a building... next
door. A building I had walked past three times, stared up at, and
deemed to be ‘not it’ more than once. And even though it was next
door, it took the bakery girls like five minutes to figure that
out. That’s Tokyo for you, folks.
Hint:
it is across the street from the Tokyu Honten department store...
Carefully pulling
open the fabled copper
door, I
entered
another tiny lounge. All of the walls were untreated concrete, cold and
industrial looking. Only the bar top and some panels behind the bar -
which were later revealed to be the entrances to storage areas - were
made of a material other than sooth grey cement; they were made of the
same copper sheeting that covered the door. There was one customer in
the place (it holds perhaps a dozen), as well as the owner / bartender,
and her dog Koshu. A small stereo in the corner was softly playing some
music that I later realized was the 1960s / early-1970s lineup of King
Crimson. This I did not expect.
My hostess did not
speak a word of
English, but
(like many Japanese) she could write it. In fact, she wrote down, on an
index card and with perfect penmanship, “I do not speak English”. She
could write it, but she could not say it, or understand it when spoken.
I was told later that most Japanese learn to read and write English in
grade school, but few learn to speak or understand it when spoken. So
weird.
Pointing at the stereo I said “King Crimson”.
She nodded a yes.
Communication!
She
did mix up a fine Negroni, however, and I got
out of there without being too severely raped on the taxes and table
charges (¥1000 for the drink, and that was that... come to think if
it, this was also sort of a bargain, my second of the evening).
I do not know how
these places stay
open. How can
anyone even know they are even there? No one would ever choose this
nondescript building, wander up three flights of stairs at random, and
then decide to pull open an unmarked door just to see if there happened
to be a high-end cocktail bar in there. Must be a word of mouth thing,
or at least a “word of index card” thing.
Onward.
My email had gone unchecked for most of the week,
but for the past day or two, I made an effort to check it more
regularly.
International Rebecca would be leaving Chicago soon, and I wanted to
send her updates, and make sure that I got any messages from her.
There
was a computer in the lobby of the hotel that charged ¥100 per ten
minutes, and on a few occasions when leaving for the day or coming home
for the night, I had paused to make sure that the Western world was
still intact.
So, leaving Kuroitsuki, I saw an internet cafe on the eighth floor of
an
HMV store, and I thought I might do another crisis check. They wanted a
ton of cash to use a computer; I had to buy a membership in order to
have the privilege of being charged by the full hour (no smaller
increments). No thanks. They had a big pile of manga
comics by
the elevator door that were free. I can’t read a word of it, but
I
thought that one of the phone book-sized mangas that you see
all over the place in Japan might make an appropriate free souvenir.
The record store (all seven stories worth, below the internet
cafe), was closing up. The employees were playing Auld Lang Sine
really loudly, on all of the floors, as a signal for people to leave.
It was really bizarre. I heard the same thing repeated in other shops
during my trip to Japan. Auld Lang Sine - go home!
And then: ¥425 at FoodeXpress.
Chicken chunks on a stick, asparagus wrapped in raw beef, and a
fish patty thing.
My pals there - Grandpa greeter and the hipster rocker kid at the
cash register - send their regards to you all.
Tuesday, May 27
Today
is my last full day by myself in
Tokyo.
Tomorrow, International
Rebecca arrives
from Chicago, and on the following day, we depart for Kyoto and Nara.
Yay!
It is a warm, sunny day, cooler in the shade, clear skies,
and not as humid as some during the previous week.
By 11:00am I was in Ueno Park once again, to check out some
of the other museums there. I had seen the Museum of Western Art, but
there is the National Museum of Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of
Art, and a few others scattered throughout the large n’ lovely Ueno
park. Even though I had been to this part of town several times
already, I somehow managed to get on the wrong train this
morning. This
was the very first and only time I got on a wrong train so far during
this entire trip. After one stop, I realized the problem, and was
back
where I needed to be within minutes.
Saw a totem pole in the park that was erected by the local
Tokyo chapter of the Lions Club. It didn’t really look like a
Native
American totem pole, but it didn’t really look Japanese either.
The
totems were an elephant, a monkey, a crocodile, a lion, an eagle, and
some other unidentifiable animals. What was interesting about it was a
little bronze plaque that said:
“Lions: Liberty, Intelligence, Our Nations’ Safety, we
serve.”
But below that was
another wooden sign with
bilingual
translations including:
“Lions:
Liberty, Intelligence, Our
Nations, Safety, we
serve.”
The
only difference is that the
apostrophe after
“nations” had turned into a comma.
So, in
the former sign, it said “...Our
Nations’
Safety...” meaning the safety of our nation. In the second sign it said
“...Our Nations, Safety...” meaning our individual nations (such as the
USA and Japan, or maybe all nations), plus Safety as well, such as
individual safety, perhaps.
Such a little
thing, but it changes the
context of the Lions slogan significantly.
Wandered
through yet another shrine (far
from the last one I'd see on this trip - just wait until we get to
Kyoto!),
and then through a large exhibit of small flowering bonzai trees (I’d
seen them setting it
up a few days earlier - remember that quip about foreshadowing?), and
then towered past a massive group of school children all wearing
identical red hats. |
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This sort
of thing is really
common in Japan, a society that has no fear
of conformity, and which does not place a high value on individualism
(except, perhaps, in Harajuku on a Sunday). Adults in
tour groups
unselfconciously parade around in identical
shirts, hats, or even matching umbrellas, should a tour occur on a
rainy day.
Arriving
at my destination, I found that the
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art has a sculpture outside that is by
Anish Kapoor, the same guy who did the landmark Cloud Gate in
Chicago, which everyone here (I mean everyone) calls “The Bean”.
Inside the
museum are six galleries.
Four of them
each require a
separate paid admission, and the other two are free. The paid galleries
are not super cheap (the one I chose at random was ¥ 700; the
then-current special exhibition was ¥1400). I was disappointed to
find that the gallery I had chosen was filled with rather amateurish
contemporary painting. I went back to the admission desk (looking up
the word for ‘traditional’ in my phrase book as I walked) and made it
clear that I wanted to see some masterpieces of classic Japanese art.
The old lady behind the desk pointed at a map.
I was at the wrong
museum.
This was the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The one I wanted was the nearby National Museum of Tokyo.
Whatever.
Resolving as
always
(when traveling) to
make the
most of any
situation, I realigned my mind for some contemporary work. What I did
not expect to discover was that this museum is a total dump.
The walls are all
corrugated pegboard,
and it
looked as though they had never been repainted or washed. There were
dirty smears and stains all over them. The pictures were hung
haphazardly, with some ‘stacked’ three high, so that the top images
were twelve or fifteen feet up. The atmosphere was also kind of
stuffy, humid, and unmuseum-like in there.
I couldn’t believe
it, actually. Given
that this
is Japan, a conspicuously clean place, and in the middle of their huge
and beautiful public park, which is also particularly well-maintained,
and that most museums, in general, anywhere, are rather spotless
places, it just didn’t make sense how dumpy this joint was. Especially
when one considers how expensive it is to enter (you have to pay four
times to see it all),
relative to the all of the other big art museums in Tokyo (most of
which are actually rather reasonably priced).
The admission fees
certainly don’t
reflect the
art either: this entire museum is devoted to contemporary painters in
the western style, and the majority of the work is rather amateurish. I
can’t imagine that this collection cost the city very much to acquire,
certainly there is nothing priceless, masterful, irreplaceable, or
historic inside. I found very little to like in the galleries that I
saw. If quality was at a premium, at least quantity was readily
available; there were a lot of works crammed into the half dozen large
gallery rooms that made up the one section of the museum that I had
paid for. But almost none of it was truly memorable. For some
reason, I
found myself shooting photos of some of the less mediocre
examples. I
think that I just wanted to have something to show for my entrance fee.
I was glad I only bought a ticket for one of the four galleries.
I
peered into some of the others, and it seemed to be more of the same.
I did like some these:
Also, none of the tags next to any of the paintings were
in romanjii (Western alphabet) at all. Most of the other
museums at least have the artists’ name and dates in romanjii,
and maybe the title of the piece. Not here. Not even the ubiquitous and
handy List of Works given out at most museums (typically printed in two
or three languages) is in any language other than Japanese here. I
guess the art should speak for itself, but in this case it is saying
very little.
Speaking
of which....
The two free galleries consist entirely of shodo, or
calligraphy art.
Miles of it.
Once again, I am functionally illiterate
in this society, so calligraphy means next to nothing to me. Most of it
was not particularly ornamented, it was just black brush strokes on
white scrolls, and I couldn’t read a word of it. I gave it an
obligatory once-over.
Exiting the gallery, two friendly women sitting
at a table by the entrance asked me to sign their guest book. They
handed me a brush and a bottle of black ink. I was almost able to fake
my way through the phrase “watashi wa nihongo ga hanasenai” (“I don’t
speak Japanese”), but they gestured that I ought to sign anyway.
I brushed out J A M E S , C H I C A G O in their book. They were
delighted.
Well.
I had seen big posters in the
park advertising a
show about
Parisian art at the turn of the (last) century (here in this museum,
for ¥1400), and another show about the Bauhaus (in the University
Museum at Tokyo University of the Arts). I was able to read a
list of
works for the Paris thing and it didn’t look that great. I
thought that
I might go see what the Bauhaus show was all about. I had to
leave the
park and find my way to the Tokyo University of the Arts, just outside
the park. It was getting really hot outside, and I actually broke
down
and bought another sports drink at a vending machine (the amusingly
named and ubiquitous Pocari Sweat, for ¥130). It was my second
sports drink of this trip, and my second sports drink of the 21st
century.
In the school, I
discovered a bunch of
kids in an
air conditioned computer lab full of iMacs, so I took a minute to cool
off and check my email.
No one seemed to mind.
International Rebecca was ready for her trip.
Arriving where the
Bauhaus exhibit
was, I was a little wary, after being disappointed at the previous
museum, and I was also aware of money getting tight. I asked the guard
where the gift shop was, with the intention of looking at the
exhibition catalog before I paid to get in, to see if it was worth the
price of
admission (¥1400). From the gift shop, I did something mildly
shady, and I guess it was particularly uncool in this trusting society
- I wandered into the exhibit, from the end of it, the part that lets
out into the gift shop. First, I was just wandering around,
curious
about what was ‘around that corner’, but when I noticed that I was had
accidentally entered the gallery space, and that no one was around at
all, I just
started perusing the gallery a bit. For some reason, all of the guards
and other people had mysteriously vanished for the moment. Soon
they
were all back, dozens of people. I had wandered in there by
chance at a
weird, random, and very temporary lull in the room’s occupation.
But I
was just another guy in the galleries by that point. So, what is
a
fella to do? I was a little nervous, I didn’t want to get kicked
out,
but none of the guards paid me any attention. I’d effortlessly gone all
Obi-Wan on them, and slid right past them with some sort of subliminal
Jedi mind trick.
I
didn’t really give
the exhibition the
sort of
detailed and focused attention that I might usually have, but it was a
nice little show about the amazing and influential early 20th century
design school, and the movement that the school inspired. There were
some nice pieces on display: art, artifacts, documents, furniture,
renderings. A further gallery of Bauhaus-influenced Japanese art
and
architecture included work by Watanabe Moriharu (Basic Study for the
Formation of Design;
1941), Ikebe Yoshiatsu (Design of a Modern Idea - Plan of a Room;
1927), Iwao Yamawaki (Theatrical Arts Laboratory...; 1926). Very
cool.
From
there I wandered
into the other
half of the
exhibition space (known as the Geidai collection), and got my fix of
the traditional Japanese art that I had hoped to see earlier
today.
This gallery, one large room with perhaps four dozen works in it (both
old and modern), contained more impressive and fulfilling pieces than
the entirety of the museum gallery (some two hundred paintings!) that I
had seen earlier.
It was made up of rarely-seen objects from the school’s
collection. Too bad that they are rarely seen - this ought to be
corrected.
Some standouts:
Taguchi Yoshikune’s Sake Cup and Stand with Piano and
Siberian Blue Robin (1984) helped to advance my appreciation for
the Japanese craft of lacquerware.
Pond at Ikaho (1925) by Eikyu Matsuoka is a lovely example
of Western-style painting (a girl sitting among some flowers in nature.
But describing it in that way is like saying that Michaelangelo painted
church ceilings. You have to
see it). Somewhat more tradtional (color on silk) is Bride in a
Rural Village by Hyakusui Hirafuku (1901). Same year, same medium: Peacock
by Hisui Sugiura. Beautiful. Tadashi Sugimata’s Tageta (sandal)
is an oil on canvas from 1949, and is a little bit Surrealist
influenced. I see some Dali in there. A more romantic or
symbolist-style work is A Lesson by Ikunosuke Shirataki (1897).
Some children learning to play music from the master. Sea God
and His Company by Kyosai Kawanabe, depicts a
powerful and angry-looking Poseidon-type of character, masterfully
executed in ink wash on paper (a style called suibokuga).
Next
to that
are a pair of large screens, each perhaps six feet wide, painted by
Shohaku Soga (1730 to 1781). These are amazing. The
title is Immortals, and it shows a pair of gods on the shore of
a pond, one holding a scroll and the other holding a turtle and
gesturing at a carp in the water. Again, a description of the
subject
hardly does justice to the power of the rendered image (a detail of Immortals
is seen to the right).
Is the Mona
Lisa just a smirking girl?
In the other panel by Soga, an elegant woman
looks amused as her three servants are accosted by a peacock.
I
walked out of there
a fan of Kawanabe
and Soga,
and also realized that a week ago my interest and knowledge of Japanese
art was fairly limited to ukiyo-e, but now I had discovered
enough lacquerware, suibokuga (painting with black ink), and
Western-style Japanese artists to make me a fan of specific creators in
each of those categories. I also learned quite a bit about this
art. For example within suibokuga, horizontal scrolls are
called emakimono
(the syllable ‘maki’ means ‘roll’, same as in the sushi bar),
vertical
scrolls are called kakemono, and folding screens are called byobu.
Outside...
A guy had
pulled a pickup truck over to
the curb, and was selling
fruit right out of the bed. He had some huge and ripe purple grapes,
which reminded me that it was lunch time. I made my way to
Akihabara -
Electric Town - just a subway stop or two away from Ueno.
Akihabara is
where you can get any electronic gadget. Everything from
computers to televisions to cameras to cell phones to iPods...
whatever you want. Also, in the smaller streets off of the main
roads,
are endless shops selling all sorts of electronic junk. Any sorts of
tubes, wires, circuits, chips, parts, accessories... whatever you need
to build your own giant robot.
Speaking
of giant robots, the anime and manga
fans also hang out in Akihabara, so there are stores that sell all of
the cool pop culture geek items: toy robots, cosplay costumes, DVDs,
Gojira (Godzilla) ephemera, gaming cards, whatever.
I
was not looking to
buy any sort of
electronic
products (not after getting my SD memory card back in Shinjuku,
anyway), but I wanted to check the area out. I wandered around for a
bit and it was more or less what I expected. I had a guy in a computer
shop show
me how to switch a Japanese keyboard between romanjii (Western
characters) and katakana / hiragana / kanji
(the three different sets of
Japanese characters). I’d been having problems with that while checking
email - very frustrating and time-consuming problems, in fact.
A store called
Mandarake caught my eye, a big
black tower, eight stories tall. The top two floors were full of
vintage and modern monster and space toys, the latter of which was
something I collected from 1977 to 1984 and then from 1995 to 2002.
Giving up the conspicuous consumerism and ceasing the feeding of my big
closet o’ action figures suddenly freed up resources that have allowed
me to travel. Lo and behold. But I like to browse for old
times’ sake,
especially when confronted with the smorgasbord of items not available
at home, but on display at Mandarake. Another floor has sort of
creepy
costumes (creepy because they were life-like anime character
outfits,
not because they were monsters or anything), another has CDs and DVDs,
and another floor has fetish porn.
Hmm, I still hadn’t
eaten, and it was after
3:30pm
already.
Found a place called Don on Koromedashi-dori, and
got a yummy
lunch consisting of a big bowl of rice topped with some salmon sashimi,
and some orange salmon eggs. I asked the waitress for mizu
(water) but I think she thought I said miso (as in soup),
because the water never appeared, but the soup did. Ah well, it
was
only ¥50. The ubiquitous honey-flavored green was also quaffed. My
total for lunch was a reasonable ¥760.
Well.
Two museums (taken in at a leisurely pace), a stroll in the park,
lunch, and an hour in Akihabra (it was interesting to me for only that
long), and it was still only 4:00pm. I was due to meet Emi and Ayami
for
dinner later, but I still had some time to kill - things had not taken
as long as I’d planned today. I had read that Kanda was a good
area for
book shopping, and I still wanted to find some nice Japanese art books
to schlep home with me.
Arriving in Kanda, I discovered that I had
already been there! Jimbocho is a sub-section of Kanda. One
person had
told me to go to Jimbocho, another person had said Kanda, but they
meant the same thing. So I was back in the same book shopping area
where I had been on Friday the 22nd.
Determined to find the
ultimate ukiyo-e
book, I went back to my favorite book store, Bohemian’s Guild, but came
out empty-handed once again. They
certainly have a lot of great
books there,
but
no one single tome was the precise ultimate jackpot of coolness.
In another shop,
I asked for a book about my new
favorite (as of
three hours earlier) suibokuga (painting with black ink) artist,
Shohaku Soga. The old timer at the desk pulled out a huge and
comprehensive volume published by the Kyoto National Museum, for which
he wanted ¥5500 (fifty-five bucks). It was an amazing book!
But, I
remembered that in the following week, I might be visiting the very
museum
that published it. It was a recent book (2005), so perhaps they’d
still
have it there (I will not leave you in suspense: they did, and for only
¥2000. I bought it.).
I did finally get my ukiyo-e book at this same shop
however. It
is perhaps not the final word on the art form, but since I already have
a book about Hokusai (one of the two great masters of the form) and
there is a great new edition of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
by Hiroshige (the other master) coming out from Taschen later this summer, I reconsidered my quest: maybe a
smaller overview is all I really needed as a souvenir of this
trip. The book I got was ¥2000 (published in 1988 by the Ota
Museum in Harajuku, which I had visited on Sunday). The book is
better than the actual museum was - the book contains a lot of the
masterworks, while the museum has rotating themed exhibits (you may
remember that when I visited the exhibit was about a poet), and rarely
displays the prints seen in the book.
See two random images
from this book orbiting this paragraph
(left and right).
A volume detailing
James A. Michener’s collection of ukiyo-e was tempting as well,
and tied in nicely with my 2006 trip to Hawaii - I had seen Michener’s
collection in a museum there - but I thought I might be able to get
that one at home. Made notes on a few other tomes to look for at
home also.
Seeing
a fake plastic bamboo facade on the front
of a store reminded me that to date, I have only seen bamboo growing
one time on this whole trip - and that was a little patch of it next to
a girl’s school near here in Kanda. We’ll see what Kyoto brings.
After dropping a
¥1000 recharge onto my
Suica subway pass, I made it once again to Shinjuku to meet Emi and
then, later,
Ayami.
Funio couldn't be there. The
day was hot, and I had done a lot of walking, of course. I was
all
sweaty and disheveled when I arrived at our meeting place (in the same
hotel lobby as on our
first meeting). Emi beat me there, so I didn’t have time to clean
up!
We were off to rendezvous with Ayami in an izakaya, or a casual
restaurant
where people gather to share drinks and small plates of food. Sort of a
cross between a tapas bar, and a real English pub (the sort you see in
every neighborhood in the UK, owned by the same people for generations,
and serving cheap local comfort food to anyone who lives in walking
distance). Except it is Japanese of course. Izakaya are
all
marked with red paper lanterns hanging outside. Interestingly,
few (if
any) other businesses promote themselves with this iconic Japanese
symbol.
Red paper lanterns = izakaya.
The
izakaya was on a
little alley crammed between the Odakyu department store and the subway
train tracks, with a
tall barrier wall protecting people from the tracks
directly across the way.
Along this
wall within this slightly grubby pedestrian way, I noticed a string of
rather peculiar signs posted every few dozen yards. I wanted to take a
photo of one, but Emi was too embarrassed.
The sign featured an icon of someone taking a leak, complete with a
little
stream of piss coming out of his crotch, with the universal red
circle-and-slash meaning “no” getting the point across: no peepee in
the
alley!
Little did I know that this Shinjuku neighborhood is called Shomben
Yokocho, or literally, Piss Alley.
It is known for its maze of izakaya
and other tiny cheap eateries (such as those featuring yakitori,
or chicken on a skewer), but I guess in the past... well you can
guess.
Your basic izakaya
is sparsely decorated,
brightly lit, functional. Large tables full of people meet after work
to order plate after plate of small portions of food to share, and to
drink Japanese beer. This is exactly what Emi, Ayami, and I did. The
food kept coming, the beer kept coming. Scallop sashimi, edamame,
lots
more. These girls were messing with me, I think they ordered crab
brain
paste (crab brain paste!) just to see how
I would react, and then they
went for the little strips of raw horse meat.
A
horse is a horse of
course of course
Yeah,
horse sashimi - three different cuts. One of them looked
like fake
turkey, one looked like extremely fatty salami, and one looked like raw
steak. I ate it up. The ladies put sauces on it to make it
palatable,
but I wanted to try it alone. They were aghast that I was going
to eat
it naked, but if I was going to eat Trigger or Mr. Ed, I wanted to at
least taste the meat, not the condiments. I can get the
condiments
anywhere. They told me that this particular horse sashimi
was
average quality,
neither great nor crappy.
Ayami showed me, proudly, a brochure from
the
retirement home chain that she works for. Taking care of the elderly is
noble and important work in Japan. As it should be
everywhere. Ayami
also gave me a CD from her friend’s band, To Piece, and a little
example of shodo that she made for me. You’ll remember from
Saturday that shodo (calligraphy) and ikebana (flower
arranging) are hobbies for her. She figured out the meaning of
each of
the four syllables of my name in Japanese (Ji-ei-mu-su), along with the
meaning of each syllable.
To wit:
ji as in gee
whiz, meaning affection
ei as in way,
meaning prosperity
mu as in moo
cow, meaning dream
and su as in A
Boy Named Sue, meaning congratulation.
She wrote it with a brush on the inside of a sort of sturdy
greeting card, or sort of a hardback book with no pages. Suffice to
say, her brushwork in writing my name was superior by far to my own
attempts to write my name in romanjii shodo earlier that
afternoon.
What a cool present!
We listened to anka
(Japanese soul music
- not Paul Anka!), and had some really good laughs. Too bad Ayami’s
husband Fumio could not be there. I had so much fun with these
people!
By the end of the night, Emi was trying to say “beer belly”, but being
Japanese she cold not handle one “L” let alone two.
Best she could
manage was something that sounded more like “beer booty”.
Maybe you had to be
there.
You definitely had to be there.
We must have been there four hours, and we ran up a big tab
(again!), but my share was ¥4000 (or maybe ¥3000 - notes are
unclear) and worth every yen.
I also learned that
Jimbocho, the area I was book
shopping in, is to be pronounced JIM-BO-CHO (all syllables accetnted,
and a "ch" sound on the last one).
I had been saying jim-BO-ko (only the middle syllable accented, and the
last syllable was "ko").
Of course my mispronounciation meant "penis".
It seems to be a global constant that when mangling foreign languages,
the common tourist always says something uncouth.
Why couldn't my mispronounciation of Jimbocho mean 'boat' or 'turnip' or 'to stub the toe'?
No, it is always naughty.
Universally.
The ladies left for
home, and I wandered around
Shinjuku for a
while.
Got a juice box of mango and orange blend (100% juice, no added
chemicals), added some Havana Club
from the flask to it, and found it to be an extremely tasty nightcap.
I headed back to the
hotel, once again enduring
the
indignity of being a white guy on my own in Roppongi. The touts
and
pimps were like ants at a picnic, as I made the inevitable walk of
shame
from the
train station to the now-familiar maze of relatively safe side streets
that would get me home to Akasaka. I stopped along the way to
gaze into
the window of a restaurant that I never did visit: a sushi
place
specializing in fugu, or blowfish. This is the famous dish that
will kill you if it is not properly prepared. This restaurant has
a
giant sculpted pufferfish atop the building (perhaps fifteen feet
wide), and an aquarium in the window. I watched someone’s main course
for the following night swimming around, looking dopey and hapless,
with no idea that its little life was just about over - and perhaps
with even less awareness at how much power it had over those who might
consume it. I thought that it might look good shellaced and hung
over
the bar in my lounge at home. I know a lot of people with
taxidermy
pufferish in their lounges (it is in style among certain
factions), but I know of no one who has actually eaten their decorative
fish before lacquering it and installing a lightbulb where the deadly
fish liver had once been.
Then I realized that I
had been in Tokyo for over
a week, and that it was all coming to an end. My trip was only
half
over, but starting tomorrow, the whole dynamic would change. A
new city
(Kyoto), a switch from solo travel to having a companion, a new hotel
room.
Almost an entirely different trip.
It was time for the change to happen - the time I had allotted for
Tokyo had been about right. Any more time would have been too much to
take for
this trip. I will return, but I have had my fill of Tokyo for now.
Time
to move on.
But still, there was the feeling of an ending.
So I couldn’t bear to go back to the
room just
yet.
I went back to the
hated corner at Roppongi
crossing, and mentally sprayed
myself down with some sort of virtual psychic pimp repellant. I
watched
the city go by, bustling and action packed, even after midnight on a
Tuesday.
With Selma Hayek staring at me from the Campari billboard on
one corner, gangsta rappers on the DiamondVision screen on the other
corner, and a woman with a metalic eyepatch standing patiently at her
psychic advisory cart on
a third corner (waiting for late-night customers in need of a
streetside palm reading), I talked into my tape recorder, spouting
philosophies fueled by beer and rum and horse sashimi and crab brains
that made no sense at all when I played it all back the next morning.
At 2:10am, I spent
another ¥468 at the
FoodeXpress: giant apples, water, half price fresh foods. Forty-seven
minutes later, International Rebecca boarded a plane in Chicago bound
for Tokyo (12:57pm Tuesday afternoon, her time).
Her ticket, by the
way, was $1075.80, nonstop on US Airways.
When she got on that
plane, I was fast asleep.
Wednesday May 28
Checked out of my hotel room in the
Weekly
Mansion Akasaka this morning, and switched to a different room in the
same hotel.
Tonight, I’d need a bigger room, because Internatonal
Rebecca is finally
joining
me.
Yay!
The new room wasn’t ready,
so I left my
bags at the reception desk.
Of course the new room cost more,
since
it was bigger, but I was annoyed that I got charged on the highest end
of the sliding scale that all hotels use when quoting rates.
You’d think that they would
give me the
‘weekly rate’ on the new room - after all that’s the rate I’d been
paying
so far.
I had been in the old room for
nine
nights
now, I paid in full (in advance), and I was quiet and courteous. I
didn’t even ask for maid service, and only asked for new towels two
times. I even took out my own trash! A model guest.
But they told
me that the new room was “a new contract” and charged me the entire
full published rate. Not the ‘special thank you to a good guest
rate’,
not the ‘internet booking rate’, and not the ‘weekly rate’.
No, this model guest got the
‘fuck you’
rate.
But I noticed
that everything in Japan
is like that.
The idea of giving someone a deal
or
helping a brother out, as a thank you for being a valued customer, does
not exist here. All employees of everything in this country are
super
friendly and helpful on a personal level, but you can’t get someone to
budge by one freaking yen (about a penny), no matter who you are
and how good your business is.
Everyone pays full price, all the
time.
But still, if someone pays for
nine nights in a hotel, in advance, without even having seen the
place first, and then opts for a tenth night (in a better room or
otherwise) you give them the same scale that they originally booked
under, you know?
You don’t go from the ‘weekly rate’ to the ‘highest
published rate’ when someone upgrades their lodgings. |
|
|
Speaking of ‘model guest’, I’d
noticed a
girl in the hotel a few times over the week who was freakishly tall,
freakishly skinny, freakishly aloof, and freakishly Scandinavian.
It
didn’t occur to me that she might be a model, although that should have
been my first thought. This morning, I spied two of her twin
sisters in the kombini
around the corner from the hotel (no, not the FoodeXpress - that is
three whole blocks away, and I had a powerful need for orange juice,
and fast, so I cheated on my beloved FoodeXpress and went to an evil
7-11). The gals had also been staying in the Weekly Mansion, and
when they piled into a van with a modeling agency logo on the side, I
realized that this agency must put all of their girls up in my hotel.
Damned cheapskates!
Get these ladies some nicer digs!
Must be the
first-tier beginner trainee
models.
So... my plan for
today was "no plan".
I wandered over to the
Hie shrine near the hotel.
I had walked past it several times and not visited. It is set high up
on a wooded hill, accessed by a long staircase through no less than
ninety torii gates (I counted them). At the top is a
medium-sized complex with live cocks crowing, and statues of monkeys
here and there. The day was hot and I was not feeling 100%
well.
The shade
was considerably cooler than the sunshine, so I sipped my juice and sat
in the serene surroundings for a bit. I looked over my notes...
most of
the major things that I wanted to see and do had been accomplished.
Tomorrow, Rebecca and I would leave for Kyoto.
If there was anything
left to do in Tokyo on my own, I had just a few hours left to do it.
Three famous views of the Hie Shrine.
I
remembered that the East
Gardens of the
Imperial Palace had been closed on the day I had gone by (after seeing
the
Tskujii Fish Market and the Bridgestone Museum of Art), so I thought
that a visit might be worth a second try, and I also remembered the
photography museum, which was in Ebisu, the sleepy part of Tokyo that I
had wandered around on my very first full day here (nine days earlier -
a
lifetime ago!). These two destinations are a bit far apart from each
other, but in the name of spending this last day in a worthwhile way, I
decided to do both.
Rebecca would be landing at 4:10pm, but given the
90-minute ride to Tokyo station, plus time getting through customs and
then a subway ride, I figured I had until at least 6:30pm until she
made it to the hotel. Plenty of
time for me to hit both of my destinations. Rebecca and I had discussed
me meeting her at the
airport, but the ride to Narita is 90 minutes and at least ¥2000 -
each way
- so it was deemed impractical; she assured me that she’d be able to
find her way to the hotel by herself. I have complete faith in
her, but
just to be sure, I emailed detailed directions about each phase of the
journey from airport to hotel.
The East Gardens
are a small part of the grounds
of the Imperial Palace, which is located in central Tokyo. Tours of the
palace itself are extremely limited; potential visitors must apply for
permission well in advance. The garden areas are open to the public
and are free. After crossing a moat and walking through a
drawbridge,
one
passes through a massive stone wall, and into the gardens.
By the time I got to there, I
was tired and
sweaty already. I
took off my shoes and sat on a bench (wow - a bench in Japan!
Rare!) along a cool and shady path, just off of the main path through
the grounds. I watched an army of tiny ants doing their thing. I
photographed a very cool music hall (called Tokagakudo) built for an
Empress’s
60th birthday in 1966. Great mid-century modern mosaic tile work on the
octagonal outside. The building was closed, and I was reprimanded by a
guard for getting too close when trying to get a good picture.
The main attraction of
the
grounds is a lovely
Japanese garden, a
quintessential
example of the style. The carefully planned and immaculately manicured
setting features lily ponds, bridges over waterways, a waterfall, small
hills, stone lanterns, and lots of
flowers.
The beauty and
serenity of the garden was spoiled
by landscapers
out in full force, with loud and stinky lawnmowers all fired up, plus
tons
of tourists, airplanes flying overhead, and the construction of a
mega-skyscraper just beyond the garden walls.
Old Japan.
Sure.
After that, I made for
Ebisu.
For some undocumented reason, I got off of the train at something
other than the optimum stop, and embarked upon what I remember being
quite a bit longer of a walk than I had estimated. The museum is
in a
large and modern shopping and nightlife area called Ybesa Garden Place,
which I had completely missed when visiting this area more than a week
earlier. The complex is a little bit plastic and generic; missing
it is
no big loss.
Got a boxed lunch in an oddly named kombini (called
Every Life, Every Fun) for ¥530.
Inside the photography
museum (¥1100), a
temporary exhibit on Moriyama Daido was the dominant
attraction, in the standard manner for Japanese museums. In fact,
I do not believe that this museum has a permanent collection on display
at all.
One whole floor of the museum was devoted to four decades (206
examples) of Daido’s street photography, printed in steadily larger
sizes as the decades passed, from 8x10s in the 1960s to the
movie poster-sized photos of the present era. Another entire
floor contained seventy of his photos from Hawaii,
created
just last year. åThese were even larger photos, huge
really, perhaps six
feet wide.
All of the work, on both floors, was stunningly banal, and almost
completely skippable, with only a few exceptions. I spent a lot of time
looking for meaning in these images, and I even watched a video
documentary showing Daido at work (with English subtitles), and I was
even less impressed after learning about the man’s methodology.
Moriyama
Daido is a street photographer, meaning that his work is
made up of moments captured via luck and a quick finger on the shutter
while roaming through life, observing people and things. Some of the
most talented and famous street photographers (such as Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Robert Frank, and Robert Doisneau) probably threw out thousands of
worthless negatives in their quest to capture the occasional gem of a
subtle moment in time, little snippets of humanity, and classic images
of people being quintessentially people. In the hands of these
(and
other) masters, street photography becomes a reflection of who we all
are as humans, caught in our least self-conscious moments.
Daido doesn’t seem to understand this. He seems to think
that going out and taking random photos of people and things
automatically imbues these images with meaning. He doesn’t seem to have
the sensitivity, the eye for art, or empathy for the human
condition that the best street photographers must posses.
He has the form down pat (taking photos of everyday life as he
sees it)
but he has missed the function (selecting for exhibition only
the photos speak to us in some
universal way).
While
considering this, I was reminded of two of the other
exhibitions I had witnessed earlier in the week, and I realized that
there was something going on here. I had seen three Japanese
artists
working in
western styles - Daido, plus Oka Shikanosuke (the Hopper-ish painter
from
the Bridgestone Museum) and Kinoshita Takanori (the Balthus-like
painter from the Yokohama Museum) - and all three had aped the physical
likeness of Western art, but all three had failed to capture the soul
or the spirit that the best of the classic Europeans brought to their
work. The Japanese artists working in the Western style have made
pretty pictures, but they have largely missed the point.
Perhaps the
Japanese
obsession with conformity and maintaining a certain public image while
around one’s peers, has stifled these artists too much to allow the
soul of their subjects to shine through in the way that it must for
this type of art to truly succeed.
Although I liked some of the work of Takanori and Shikanosuke,
none of it truly moved me. Now, looking at the thoroughly lame Daido, I
have
figured out what was missing in the other two men’s work: the freedom
of
the artist to go beyond craftsmanship, and to truly express something
from far deeper inside. The Japanese people just don’t do
that. Even in their art, they are holding something essential
back from the
rest of the world.
And they may not even realize it.
And yet in their own native art forms, there is something intangible
and amazing going on: from the ukiyo-e prints produced for
consumption by the common man, to the often wonderful suibokuga (ink
wash on paper), to the brilliant craftsmanship of the best shikki
(laquerware), it has become clear to me that Japanese
artists are at their best when they are making Japanese art.
May the Japanese forever continue to produce geniuses like Shohaku
Soga, but may they also
leave the Western-style art to the Western artists!
I left the
museum under dangerously grey skies by
5:00pm, and
headed back to the hotel. By my reckoning, Rebecca would now be on the
ground, and would also be on her way to the hotel. But still, I
figured I had close to two hours
until her arrival.
After
retrieving my bags from the reception desk and bringing them up to the
new room, I spent some
time sorting and organizing all of my stuff, trying to get my souvenirs
and purchases crammed into the small suitcase that I brought. A shower
and shave made me feel more human, and for the first time, I put on a yukata
(a lightweight kimono or bathrobe that all hotels in Japan provide for
their guests), and relaxed for a bit.
Around 7:00pm,
I was just beginning to get
nervous
about Rebecca getting lost or delayed. I thought that I might go
outside and stand at the street corner so as to help her along on the
last two blocks of her 6300 mile journey. But then, the door opened,
and Rebecca came in!
Hooray!
We got caught
up on a few current events, and
before long she was relaxed, cleaned up, and ready for dinner. I had
spent nine days exploring this city, and there were so many wonders to
share (believe it or not, only a fraction of which are related in this
endless narrative). But Rebecca's time in Tokyo was limited to
tonight
and one day next week, just before we were to fly home. Her focus of
interest was our trip to Kyoto, for which we’d be leaving tomorrow.
With so much to see and do here in Tokyo, but keeping in mind her
state of tiredness from her exhausting travel, I suggested a dinner
stop in not-too distant Shibuya. She’d be able to see a busy and
insane, but moderately upscale and rather impressive part of Tokyo, and
we’d be able to find a decent meal there - Shibuya is quintessentially
Tokyo, and it also has plenty of restaurants.
We settled into
a random udon place, and
we each got
a big bowl full of noodles. Mine were big think noodles with a big
sheet of seaweed paper on top, and an egg yolk on top of that
(¥730), and Rebecca’s was a broth with thinner soba (wheat)
noodles in it,
embellished with various vegetables (¥800). The menu said
“vegtables (sic) grown in mountain”.
We wandered
around
Shibuya for a bit, and
eventually popped our heads into a kombini.
Rebecca got a
colorfully
decorated juice box full of sake, and I got something called Choya,
which is acquired in a glass jar will a pull-top metal lid on it, full
of two ounces of some unidentifiable liqueur and two tiny
liqueur-doused fruits (possibly relatives of the grape).
Arriving back
in Akasaka with the intent to
retire early, Rebecca got to meet Grandpa Friendly-san
and register-rockin’ hipster kid-san at FoodeXpress, where I got a big
water for ¥138, and showed Rebecca all of the seriously weird stuff
they sell in Japanese grocery stores.
This
is has been part
three (of
five): May 26
to 28, 2008
part one part
two part
three part four part
five
"Tiki Bar Review Pages",
"Tiki Road
Trip", "Tydirium Multimedia", "Left
Orbit Temple", "Chester Century", "Big Stone Head", "TiPSY
Factor", "Johnny Clash",
"Tiki TV", "Cocktail Snob", and "Blue Harvest Magazine" are
trademarks of
James A. Teitelbaum.
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