Lost In Translation

Hungry Critter

This hungry critter is outside a restaurant in Hatagaya near where I play basketball on weekends.

Rebeling Through Pornography

I came across this article in The Daily Yomiuri yesterday and I find it disturbing that young girls see "modeling" as a way to rebel from their parents:

A third-year girl student at a middle school in Tokyo told The Yomiuri Shimbun last year how she posted a message on an Internet bulletin board that was recruiting models. She stipulated that her conditions were that not appear naked and that receive at least 5,000 yen per hour. The girl, whose name is being withheld due to her age, met four men after contacting them via the Internet.

"I didn't meet men who sounded suspect when I first spoke to them on the phone," she said.

But once, when she met a man in his 40s in a hotel room, he threatened her, demanding she let him take a photo of her naked. The girl quoted him as saying, "You'd better do it if you want that amount of cash."

She also said that she had once been given an envelope containing blank sheets of paper, instead of banknotes. Her friend was gang-raped when she went to a hotel room to find a group of men waiting for her, she said.

But the girl added, "Sure there's a risk, but I need money to buy the things I want. It's also a way to rebel against my parents."

"Victims are physically adults, but they're still naive," said Junko Miyamoto, a representative of the international nongovernmental organization End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography And Trafficking in Children for Sexual Purposes/Stop Japan. "They often act in the heat of the moment or are easily taken
in. Adults should let them know what life's really like and admonish them harshly."

"Modeling" can mean just fully clothed festish shots, but according to the article it also sometimes means pornography, paid sex, rape, or being shortchanged on the fee. What happened to healthy rebeling like being in a punk band, drinking too much fooling around with teenage boys and staying out late? Then again this comes from a society where adolescent girls will sell their panties and more for designer brand goods and pocket money.

Happy Diary Day?

I thought Japan was the best at creating commerce based holidays that encouraged consumer spending, but it looks as if the Koreans, inspired by the Japanese, take the cake:

The burden of a S.Korean calendar laden with love Wed Jan 4, 2006 08:10 AM ET By Jon Herskovitz and Lee Jin-joo

SEOUL (Reuters) - Love comes at a hefty price in South Korea.

There are up to 21 anniversaries, special days and celebrations a year for couples to shower each other with affection and gifts, and as a result some relationships are crushed under the weight of festivities.

South Korean companies looked at the wild success of Valentine's Day celebrations in their country and found ways to sell their goods and services through a tie-up with love, marketing officials say.

Thanks to shrewd marketing in a society focused on commerce as well as love and matrimony, there is a special day on the 14th of each month for lovers to celebrate as well as a few other goodies along the way.

For example, January 14 is Diary Day in South Korea when sweethearts are encouraged to buy gifts such as planners and mark all their red-letter days of love.

Next on the calendar is February 14 and Valentine's Day, where South Korean women buy chocolates for their boyfriends.

Army trucks are regularly deployed to deliver chocolates from women whose boyfriends are in uniform as part of South Korea's mandatory military service.

March 14 is White Day. This celebration was born in Japan, imported to South Korea and is marked by South Korean men returning the favor of their Valentine's chocolates with candies for their girlfriends.

April 14 is Black Day and is purely Korean. This is a day where those who have not found love mark their status as lonely hearts by eating black food.

The dish for the day is Chinese noodles topped with a thick black sauce. Single students at universities order scores of bowls and eat them together in the hope of finding a soul mate over noodles.

May 15 is Yellow Day-Rose Day. Lonely hearts gather for curry and companionship. Those who find love by this day exchange roses. Dressing in yellow is also recommended.

LOVE AND LIQUOR IN THE PARK

The rest of the celebrations that come each month on the 14th have yet to gain a strong following.

Click here to read the rest.

Punk Rock Poet

I got turned onto to Patti Smith's excellent Horses while in college, it is now the 30th anniversary of that seminal album and it still sounds vital to me. Smith is also a poet:

There is nothing tidy about Patti Smith. Her wiry hair is often tangled. She is called the "Godmother of punk," but her "punk" songs last much longer than the conventional three minutes, and have been known to involve digressions about William Blake. At the height of '70s nihilism, epitomized by the Sex Pistols ("I got no emotions for anybody else/ You better understand I'm in love with myself"), she remained a Rimbaudian troubadour devoted to the visionary tradition ("And I know soon that the sky will split/ And the planets will shift/ Balls of jade will drop.") Today, over lunch at a Midtown restaurant, she could be mistaken for a naif, speaking of art as a pursuit of the "good" and the "sacred." Except she knows perfectly well how she sounds. She is, she has said, an "unfashionably unreconstructed '60s radical." The truth is that Smith has little respect for categories. She is one of the world's most influential rock stars, yet she continues to write, of all things, poetry.

Last fall marked the 30th anniversary of Smith's Horses, her landmark debut album, which helped usher in the punk rock era. She observed the occasion by playing two sold-out shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York (and blowing critics away), and by releasing Auguries of Innocence, a slim book of verse robed in a modest gray dust jacket without any accolades from fellow authors. Over lunch, she was happy to talk about her poetic influences. "I've been slowly reading more contemporary poetry—someone like James Wright, or Sylvia Plath, who is probably my biggest influence among contemporary poets. I learned a lot from her rhythms, repetition, and her strong sense of poetic structure," she said, with unstudied enthusiasm.

Read the whole article at Slate.com.

Wafu="Japanese Style"

I had a tasty, but unusual pasta at Komugiko, my favorite restaurant near the Hakusan campus, for lunch today. It was the daily special: "Wafu" Meat Sauce. "Wafu" means "Japanese style", and this usually means mentaiko (spicy cod roe), and I really don't like fish eggs. However, this dish was a meat sauce made with miso paste, eggplant, flakes of chili topped off with sliced cucumbers and sesame seeds. It was very tasty, and a very Japanese interpretation of a classic Italian dish.

Listening Post: First Impressions of Earth

Here's my first CD review of the new year in today's Japan Times:

LISTENING POST

RECORDED
The Strokes "First Impressions of Earth"
By PATRICK MCCOY

When The Strokes first emerged from the N.Y. underground scene in 2001 they were hailed as the saviors of rock 'n' roll. It's no surprise that they were unable to live up to such expectations. Who could? Their second release, "Room on Fire" (2002), was an album arrested in development, with the same sound that put them on the map -- the just-roused-from-sleep vocals and choppy dueling guitars that harken back to N.Y.'s punk glory days.

This time The Strokes have taken a chance and gone in a new direction with producer Dave Kahne (known for his work with 1980s new wave acts), giving it a fresh, crisper sound. The album is more ambitious in scope -- just under an hour, it is about the same length of the first two albums combined.

The jerky "You Only Live Once" opens the album with the inspired vocals of Julian Casablancas, before hipster irony reigns in "Razorblade" with a chorus borrowed from Barry Manilow's "Mandy." Lyrically there is room for improvement, as some songs are uninspired and sophomoric: "I was hiding from the world, I was a squirrel," Casablancas sings in "Fear of Sleep."

Asking The Strokes to save rock 'n' roll may have been too much, but they are certainly capable of growing into a band of lasting significance.

Another Fraud?!

I am in the midst of reading the engaging and thought-provoking Freakanomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and had just finished the chapter "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?", when I came across this article in The New York Times Magazine by the authors questioning one of their major sources for the chapter:

Information Asymmetries: Our book "Freakonomics" includes a chapter titled "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" This chapter was our effort to bring to life the economic concept known as information asymmetry, a state wherein one party to a transaction has better information than another party. It is probably obvious that real-estate agents typically have better information than their clients. The Klan story was perhaps less obvious. We argued that the Klan's secrecy - its rituals, made-up language, passwords and so on - formed an information asymmetry that furthered its aim of terrorizing blacks and others.

But the Klan was not the hero of our story. The hero was a man named Stetson Kennedy, a white Floridian from an old-line family who from an early age sought to assail racial and social injustices. Out of all of his crusades - for unionism, voting rights and numberless other causes - Kennedy is best known for taking on the Klan in the 1940's. In his book "The Klan Unmasked" (originally published in 1954 as "I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan"), Kennedy describes how he adopted a false identity to infiltrate the Klan's main chapter in Atlanta, was chosen to serve as a "klavalier" (a Klan strong-arm man) and repeatedly found himself at the center of astonishing events, all the while courting great personal risk.

***

When presented with documents from his own archives and asked outright, several weeks ago over lunch near his Florida home, if "The Klan Unmasked" was "somewhat conflated or fictionalized," Kennedy said no. "There may have been a bit of dialogue that was not as I remembered it," he answered. "But beyond that, no." When pressed, Kennedy did concede that "in some cases I took the reports and actions of this other guy and incorporated them into one narrative." As it turns out, Kennedy has made such an admission at least once before. Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, wrote a 1992 dissertation called "Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy," based in part on extensive interviews with her subject. In an endnote, Bulger writes that "Kennedy combined his personal experiences undercover with the narratives provided by John Brown in writing 'I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan' in 1954."

We weren't very happy, of course, to learn that a story we included in "Freakonomics" was built on such shaky foundations - especially since the book is devoted to upending conventional wisdoms rather than reinforcing them, and concerning Stetson Kennedy, the most conventional wisdom of all is his reputation as a Klan infiltrator.

There is also the fact that in our work we make a point of depending less on anecdote in favor of data, the idea being that numbers tend to lie less baldly than people do. But the story of Stetson Kennedy was one long series of anecdotes - which, no matter how many times they were cited over the decades, were nearly all generated by the same self-interested source.

Click here to read the rest.

More Bird Talk

In another entertaining colum from Page 2, Chuck Klosterman discusses the Adam Morrison/Larry Bird comparison, "the white gunner theory" (courtesy of Malcolm Galdwell), and the guilt associated with same-race comparisons in sports discussions:

...For the past three months, I have heard numerous pundits insist that Adam Morrison is not like Larry Bird, and that anyone who draws such a connection is a languid, biased thinker. It's the most counterintuitive of paradoxes: Politically, it feels as though Bird and Morrison should not be compared, and this is because both of them are white. Which raises a question that creeps into many sports arguments without ever being addressed directly: What do we do when two white (or two black) athletes are similar for clichéd, unprogressive reasons?

Click here to read the whole article.

Kadomatsu

This bamboo/pine/straw piece is called "kadomatsu." It is a New Year's tradition to put them at the entrance to a building to welcome the new year god and keep out evil spirits during the first seven days of the new year. This one is in Bunkyo-ku near Hakusan. I don't remember seeing one before since I'm usually out of the country during New Year's day.

Literary Frauds

The big news all over the net is that James Frey and JT Leroy may not have been forthcoming about who they are and what they've been through. I have to admit reading Frey's books and being atonished that all these things could have happened to one person, but I assumed it was the old "truth is stranger than fiction" adage rearing it's ugly head. Here's one exerpt from Salon.com:

Not much business got done in the world of publishing on Monday. Editors and writers all over New York spent the morning poring over the Smoking Gun's lengthy, meticulous exposé of the fabrications and exaggerations in James Frey's bestselling addiction memoir "A Million Little Pieces." The afternoon they devoted to e-mailing and phoning friends and colleagues to discuss all the gory details.

The Smoking Gun's admirably dogged investigation unearthed evidence that, among other things, Frey had exaggerated the criminal record he'd racked up by the time he checked into an unnamed Minnesota rehab center (later identified as Hazelden) and concocted a role for himself in the accidental death of a high school classmate. The small town police officers Frey claims to have insulted, assaulted and in one case hit with a car told the Web site that they have no memory of those encounters. Frey also apparently fabricated the existence of a fellow county jail prisoner whom the police allegedly bribed to beat Frey up during a three-month sentence that Frey may have never served.

These revelations come cheek by jowl with a story in the New York Times establishing that the 25-year-old writer JT Leroy, author of gritty/lyrical fiction based on his supposed real-life experience as a pubescent truck stop hustler and street kid, is almost certainly a 40-year-old woman whose sister-in-law was hired to pose as the boy. Now is not a comfy moment for the kind of writer who specializes in retailing his (or her) screwed-up, strung-out, hard-luck, down and dirty past.