Lost In Translation

Kuki Festival

The citizens of Kuki are already preparing for their annual summer chochin (lantern) matsuri (festival), which takes place at the beginning of August, by decorating the station with these colorful ornaments.

Technical Problems

For some reason I haven't been able to connect to Moveable Type, so that's why I haven't been posting...well that and a busy weekend.

Feels Like Summer

It really feels like summer now, even though I still have a few classes left to teach. Saturday I went to a BBQ in Saitama. Yesterday I went to Yugihama Beach near Kamakura in Kanagawa. Both times I forgot to bring my camera (sorry no pictures). Today is Umi No Hi (Marine Day), so it's a national holiday.

Art Gallery

I like this art gallerry entrance that is on Kasuga dori, I pass it everytime I go to the gym in Otsuka, which lately is 4 or 5 times a week.

DVD Review: Stray Dog

I made a recent purchase of some Kurosawa films form Amazon.com, and I recently watched the first, Stray Dog. It was the first non-samurai movie I?ve seen since Rhapsody in August, an anti war movie that I saw many years ago and barely remember. I really enjoyed and was quite impressed with this early work of Kurosawa. But this film combines two things that I am really interested in film noir and the allied occupation of Japan. On one level it is film noir, a detective gets his hand gun pick pocketed on a crowded bus and tries to chase down the "rabid dog" before any other people are killed.

The occupation and the Meiji restoration are the most interesting historical periods for me; because they are periods of great flux and help explain why Japan is the way it is today. The second aspect that appealed to me was that it is set in occupied Japan after the war. Interestingly the black markets figure in prominently during the film.On another level it is a mediation on the options available to people in post war Japan, the moral choice that ex-army soldier Murakami (Mifune) takes, or the amoral destructive role the thief/murderer Yusa takes. There?s a great commentary by Stephen Prince, who also narrated the commentary for the classic, The Seven Samurai. I think I might develop this theme and write any essay on it.

Beer Gardens

One the great summer phenomenas in Japan are the beer gardens. Most of them are on the roofs of department store buildings and involve all-you-can-drink and all-you-can-eat options. Yesterday I met some friends at the Parco department store beer garden which has a Taiwanese theme to it. So the food is mostly Taiwanese, shumai, noodles, spring rolls, etc... It cost 3000 yen (about $28) for two hours.

Audition

During my last break I signed up with a talent agency that a friend of mine had been doing work for in his spare time. I have long breaks and the time. They seemed to call whenever I went out of town. Yesterday I went to my first audition for a TV commercial. I was told to wear a loose fitting T-shirt because they wanted a big guy and possibly needed him to look bigger. If I got the part it would mean 60,000 yen (over $500) for 8 hours work. So I figured "why not?"-I had the time.

So I guess my casting call was a little bit insulting, I figured that I wouldn't have much of a chance, because I figured there must be some real fat asses who were bigger than me, and if you look at the picture above at the two fellows to the left, it was true. They were also casting for babies and blonde women. So there were about five Russian women talking loudly in Russian, five babies screaming and five of us "big" guys. They took pictures, we screen tested by giving our names and ages. I was the youngest guy by about 10 years. Strangely all of the Russian women were 29 or younger, despite looking a bit rough for only being "29." A curious expereince.

Strange Love

This the first academic paper I've written this year. It is a bit of a deaprture in that I've written about a literary subject rather than Teaching/Linguistics/ESL. This will be published in a Law journal, of all things, at Heisei Interantional Univereisty. I hope to write two more essays this year. I'm thinking about writing about factors that hinder the Japanese learner (ie cultural, linguistic, social, etc...) from learning English, Akira Kurosawa, and perhaps another paper on Tanizaki, however focusing on his novel NAOMI.

Strange Love: Masochism In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi
By Patrick McCoy

Introduction

Junichiro Tanizaki, one of Japan's most famous authors, has written a body of work that contains several variations on the theme of an imaginary or ideal world. In virtually all of his fiction, Tanizaki has his characters construct and revel in imaginary, alternative worlds, where, because their fantasies are amoral and unfettered by social restraints, they find greater truth, beauty, and pleasure than are available to them in the "real" world with it's convention and rules. (Chambers 1994, p3)

This particularly true of Tanizaki?s novella Bushuu Kou hiwa (The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi) written in 1931, a popular fiction that Tanizaki serialized in Shinsein (New Youth) magazine. It was apparently written to improve his finances, but it seems that Tanizaki was equally interested in the possibilities of "popular" fiction in general. Chambers (1994, p.18) reports that Tanizaki wrote the following in 1926:

I have acquired a bad habit recently. I cannot bring myself to write or read anything that takes real facts for its material, or that is even realistic. This is one reason I make no attempts to read the works or contemporary authors that appear in the magazines every month. I scan the first five or six lines, say to myself "Aha! He's writing about himself", and lose all desire to go on reading, I have come to prefer perversity to simplicity, sophistication to artlessness?
Generally I read things that have nothing to do with the present. When I read historical novels, nonsense tales, even realistic novels of fifty years ago, or contemporary Western novels far removed from Japanese society, I can enjoy them as so many imaginary worlds. Last year I read a number of historical novels. I was most impressed with Nakazato Kaizan?s Daibosatsu Pass, Heloise and Abelard and Ulick and Sacha by George Moore, and The Charterhouse of Parma, "The Abbess of Castro", and one or two by Stendhal.

The passage above suggests that Tanizaki has an interest in creating an imaginary world based on historical circumstances. One aspect of the imaginary world that Tanizaki refers to is that of the masochist who seeks the realization of a fantasy world. For example, in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, the main character Terukatsu is fixated with the image of a severed woman?s head (a head taken from battle with the nose missing) that he sees being dressed by a beautiful young girl as a boy. As he grows older the fixation becomes an obsession, a masochist castration fantasy.

Tanizaki's presentation of the masochist fantasy is similar to that of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the founding father of masochism. This idea can be seen in an observation made by Gilles DeLeuze, who wrote in 1969 (Long, 1996):

In many of his stories he has no difficulty in presenting masochistic fantasies as though they were instances of national custom and folklore, or the innocent games of children or the frolics of a loving woman, or even the demands or morality or patriotism?.Masoch succeeds in presenting a great part of his work in a "reassuring" note finds justification for masochistic behavior in the most varied motivations. (25-6)

This treatment can be seen in a number of works ranging from the long suffering servant of the cruel shamisen instructor in the story "A Portrait of Shunkin" (1933) to the obsessive, cuckold Joji in the novel Naomi (1924-25). However, it is most striking in The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, where the masochistic protagonist is tormented by a castration fantasy.

If you want to read the whole essay click Download file for the download.

A Lonely Stretch Of Road

This picture was taken from the bus that takes me from Kuki Station in Saitama to Heisei International Univeristy. It takes about 15 minutes to get there and it really makes me feel as though I've left the city-it's "inaka"-which means country. But it is a good time to see the rice fields with the green stalks swaying to and fro in the wind. Only one more week of that long journey left.

Recent Films

So I recently saw another recommendation by my friend Arun, Peeping Tom directed by Michael Powell, who also was the director of Black Narcissus. Unfortunately, I didn?t like this one as much. It seemed psychologically simplistic, and outdated in relation to the post Silence of the Lambs present. I am sure that this "British Psycho" is historically important, but I couldn?t see much merit in light of the modern era.

I also recently watched The Lady Vanishes, a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was an intriguing mystery. It was thrilling and humorous. It really reminded me of a Graham Greene-type story, with all the foreign intrigue and spies. I found it much more watchable than Peeping Tom.