Lost In Translation

Kung Phao

One of the old managers of Changpa has opened a small Thai restaurant in Shinjuku 3 chome, Kung Phao. It has a special party room that can be reserved, which has a refrigerator so we can BYOB. It also has a karaoke machine if we want to sing or just listen to it as background music. (above from right to left: Lorenzo, Tony, Kasumi, and Ei-chan)

Dog Days

There's a new Malcolm Gladwell article appearing in the May 22 print edition of The New Yorker, I think I'll have to pick it up. it sounds interesting from this interview:

Dog Days

Malcolm Gladwell discusses Cesar Millan, the host of the National Geographic TV show “Dog Whisperer.” and what canine behavior tells us about human behavior.

This week in the magazine, Malcolm Gladwell profiles Cesar Millan, the host of the National Geographic TV show “Dog Whisperer.” Here, with Ben Greenman, Gladwell discusses Millan and what canine behavior tells us about human behavior.

Click here to read the interview.

Lunch @ Okubai

I've only eaten at Okubai, in Myogadani, a few times, but they have a nice lunch set, so I should eat there more often. This is the daily fish set, and the fish of the day was saba (saury pike?). Tasty and healthy.

Behind The Paper Screen: Shame

Behind The Screen is the Daily Yomiuri's new occasional column by Sawa Kurotani, who replaces Kimiko Manes, is an American trained cultural anthropologist and director of Asian Studeis at University of Redlands in California. No offense to Ms. Manes, but Kurotani seems more up to the job of bi-cultural analysis. Manes, more often than not, seemed to working from preceived notions more than well-researched opinions based on observed fact. In this inaugural column Kurotani looks at the culture of shame, which I briefly addressed in an earlier post on hazukashii:

Commonly used idioms reflect how important it is for Japanese to be mindful of the evaluating eyes of the others and avoid shame or haji. There is nothing worse than to haji o sarasu (expose one's shame in public); one is forced in desperation to haji o shinobu (to endure shame); and a haji shirazu (a person who doesn't know shame) is the lowest of lowlifes. Shame has a cumulative effect as well: haji no uwanuri (a coat of shame over another) implies that, if not careful, one can end up covered in layers of shame.

Haji is a central theme in the Japanese socialization process, and children are encouraged to worry about what others think about them from early on. If you were able to catch what the parents were saying to their "screeching children," more than likely, you would have found them telling their children that "other people" (i.e., you) are laughing or upset at him or her, or perhaps, that parents were feeling ashamed because of their children's poor behavior.

Either way, children are being taught to mind, first and foremost, the fact that other people thought poorly of this behavior. I certainly felt the weight of my "shame culture" while I was growing. It was hazukashii (shameful, disgraceful) not to make a good grade, but it was also hazukashii to ask a question in the classroom (as students seldom asked questions in those days). It is hazukashii to go to a funeral wearing anything but black (panty hose included). It is hazukashii to greet a neighbor in too loud a voice, but it is even more hazukashii to fail to greet her. It seemed as though, no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I always ended up feeling hazukashii.

I find Kurotani's discussion of the limits of shame particularly interesting and illuminating in regards to Japanese culture:

Both guilt and shame have their own limits in defining and regulating appropriate social behavior, but for different reasons. Guilt falters when a person fails to internalize the set of shared values as the absolute standard of conduct; and when this happens, there is no other mechanism to keep people's behavior in check. The situational nature of shame does not make it the sole responsibility of an individual to behave appropriately, but rather makes it a communal responsibility.

The limitation of shame, then, has to do with the perception of the "community" or the group of "others" whose opinion matters to the self. "Inconsiderate behavior" in the situation of anonymity demonstrates how shame does not extend beyond this perceived "community." Traveling is another situation in which the disconnection from the community allows Japanese individuals to behave poorly. As the old saying goes, tabi no haji wa kakisute, or "the shame incurred while traveling can be easily discarded and forgotten."

Lack of haji may also be the product of a deeply felt sense of marginalization within contemporary Japanese society. Street youth, whom I described earlier, can act the way they do without feeling hazukashii, because they feel little connection to the rest of society, and therefore, from their perspective, it was as though there was no one else around.

Similarly, ever-present chikan, or "perverts" on the trains, demonstrate that otherwise inconceivably lewd conduct becomes perfectly conceivable in this vacuum of social relations where people tightly wrap themselves with an impenetrable barrier of indifference in this transitory space between home and work.

Kurotani goes onto to contradict the findings of Benedict:

"Shame" in Benedict's rendition carries a heavy moral significance, which leads Japanese individuals to do anything possible to avoid it or to conceal it from others' knowledge. Contrary to her argument, Japanese love to talk about their experiences of haji, and even loudly exclaim "Hazukashii!" not only when they are "ashamed" and "disgraced," but also when they feel "embarrassed," "bashful," "awkward," and perhaps, "socially inept."

Hazukashii, in other words, encompasses all kinds of occasions in which the presentation of one's social self has been breached. This breach of self-presentation may range from grave to trivial, but it happens to just about everyone on a daily basis in a society where the rules of appropriate conduct are rather narrowly defined. It is curious, however, that instead of trying to conceal such experiences they are publicly announced and actively shared.

"Shame culture" tolerates human faults as only "situational," and does not condemn the entire person when his or her conduct is less than perfect. Thus, by exclaiming "hazukashii" and making their shame, embarrassment or social blooper shared knowledge, Japanese can, in fact, strengthen their connections with others and lessen the burden on their souls.

Kentucky Bourbon and Irish Whisky

When my friend Bill came to visit, he asked me if there was any booze that I wanted sicne he planned to take advantage of the three bottle duty free rule. So I asked for Bombay Sapphire Gin (gin tonics are my favorite drink), Kentucky Bourbon, and Irish Whiskey (all the while thinking Maker's Mark and Jameson's). He ended being creative and getting 144 proof (70%) George T. Stagg Kentucky Bourbon and Knappogue Castle Irish Whisky. I've never had either before, but as you can imagine both are quite good, however, the George T. Stagg cannot be drunk straight-you definately need some water to make it drinkable. Much appreciated for sure.

Book Club: Machiavelli's Children

This month’s selection is Machiavelli’s Children by Richard J. Samuels. I really enjoyed this book. It was a comparative analysis of the modern development of the Italian and Japanese states, in which there were more similarities than you might have initially thought. The early chapters of the Meiji Restoration proved invaluable as a source on the research paper I wrote for my correspondence history course. The context in which he compares and contrasts the rise (late 19th century), fall (the devastation of being on the losing side of WWII), and subsequent rebirth was through the visionary leaders of past and present. In fact, I found the later chapters on contemporary politicians and the potential directions of both countries equally fascinating. I still have to admit that I am a little shaky on modern Italian history, but found the comparisons fascinating nonetheless. The fact that both countries were backward agriculturally centered societies that became major world players through authoritarianism and the legacy of the mafia and yakuza in politics and business are fascinating to read about. I think the book was well researched and effectively organized and written in a manner to interest the general reader interested in history. I hope we continue to read more books like this in the future. As an added bonus Samuels is coming to lecture on his book later this month and I plan to attend.

Middle Class / White / Indie Rocker

Slate had two interesting articles about rock music and critics. One central question in one of the articles was whether or not you're racist if you don't like rap. I'd say that less than 5% of my music is created by black artists, just not my bag--I'm a middle class white indie rocker. Consider:

And even if he did: If black artists are underrepresented in my CD collection relative to the frequency with which black people are found in the general population, does that make me a racist? To even begin to believe that it does, you have to first maintain that racial preferences somehow logically relate to music preferences; that racists avoid music made by black people, and that people who aren't racist don't pay attention to the race of the artist when evaluating music. Both propositions are ludicrous. Anybody who has been to a frat party knows that people can simultaneously a) entertain racist attitudes and b) enjoy listening to hip-hop music created by black people. (In fact, Merritt's argument is that the latter tends to reinforce the former.)

The other one suggests that if you hate rock you might be a critic. I have also been somewhat at odds to understand how The Outkast and other Top 40 non-rock acts have been getting so much critical support--that stuff's just not my bag. Here's a sample of where that idea of "popism" is coming from:

Poptimism, in other words, is a pure product of the zeitgeist, and as such, it's probably wise to keep an eye out for its perils, lest what began as a necessary corrective devolve into, as Sanneh wrote of rockism, a caricature used as a bludgeon against other music. At the EMP conference, a couple of papers brought the dilemma into focus. One was Randall Roberts' talk on the Rolling Stone Record Guide and the "creation of the canon," a whirlwind survey of the magazine's record guide from 1984. The guide virtually ignored hip-hop and ruthlessly panned heavy metal, the two genres that within a few years would dominate the pop charts. In an auditorium packed with music journalists, you could detect more than a few anxious titters: How many of us will want our record reviews read back to us 20 years hence? Sanneh ended his Times manifesto by writing, "We deserve some new prejudices," and listening to a previous generation's blunders you couldn't help but wonder: How am I blowing it?

One rule of thumb, I suppose, is to not replace one flawed canon with another. Last October, Blender magazine published a special "500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born" cover story, focusing on music released since 1980. (More disclosure: I write for Blender on freelance basis and contributed to the "Greatest Songs" feature, although I had no part in choosing the songs.) This was a kind of poptimist stunt, an answer to unrepentant rockist fogeyism of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs list, which that magazine had issued some months previous. Now, to be fair, Blender has a deeply irreverent editorial stance and specializes in tongue-in-cheek E! Television style lists (e.g., "The 50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars"), and what's more it was a pretty damn good list, filled with hip-hop and dance-pop and, yep, hair metal. It was also refreshing not to read for the 100th time how the "Satisfaction" guitar riff came to Keith Richards in his sleep, how "Respect" captured the spirit of the civil rights movement, and how incredibly frigging groundbreaking it was for Bob Dylan to release a 6-minute-long single. Still, there's something a bit show-offy about ranking Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" the 32nd best song of the past quarter-century—if you're going to include Springsteen-style rock bombast, why not the real article instead of a blowsy karaoke version?—and ultimately, the Blender list seemed to embody the pitfalls of the anti-rockist backlash: poptimism as a glib exercise in pseudo-populism and in tweaking the boomers instead of a real effort to engage history and figure out what makes good music and why.

Ideally, poptimism shouldn't be about critics working through their daddy issues and straining to prove that they're hipper than Greil Marcus. It should be about openness to all kinds of music—including music that seems to embody rockist ideals. Back at the opening panel discussion at the EMP conference, the singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields fame) professed his love for all pop music "except roots rock," a line that elicited hearty guffaws. (He said other things at the panel that caused a stir—but that's another ball of wax.) Of course, had Merritt said "except hip-hop" or "except country," there would have been gasps of horror all around, and those laughs laid bare the poptimist prejudice: It's not cool to pick on Kanye or Shania, but those rockist avatars, the earnest heartland rockers, are fair game. Where does that leave poor Johnny Mellencamp?

I don't doubt that Merritt genuinely hates roots rock; I'm not about to load John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band onto my iPod, either. Everyone, even a critic, has a God-given right to his or her musical loathings. The question, for those of us who make our living at this, is how to talk about the music we love, and hate, intelligently and non-ideologically. It's easier said than done. One of the best papers I saw at the EMP conference was Canadian writer Carl Wilson's attempt to come to terms with his distaste for Céline Dion, whose massive, gazillion-record-selling, worldwide popularity and almost universal loathing by music critics (himself included) presents a quandary. "A critical generation claiming to swear off all bourgeois elitist bias seems at least obliged to account for the immense popularity of someone we've collectively deemed so devoid of appeal," Wilson said. "Those who find Celine … tacky, gauche, kitschy … must be overlooking something, maybe starting with why those categories exist." One of Wilson's tentative conclusions is that critics should spend some time trying to understand other's tastes rather than building ideological buttresses to bolster their own.

That's a sensible and humane suggestion, and critics would do well to bear it in mind not just when reckoning with The Céline, but other unfashionable performers and genres—Dave Matthews and frat-boy jam-band music leap to mind—that unlike, say, teen pop, aren't easily reclaimed as camp or saluted for their cool production values. In the meantime, poptimists might spend some time reflecting on what rockists got right. Rockism was a product of its own historical moment, a time when rock critics had to face down snobs on both their right and left flanks who dismissed the idea that pop music could ever be art at all. It's a pity that critics succeeded in beating back the cultural elitists by creating their own high-low hierarchies within pop, but to the extent that Madonna and Jay-Z are today spoken of as "artists" without anyone batting an eye, we all owe rockists a big-up.

The Best American Novel in the Last 25 Years?

The NY Times has made a survey and has come up with one of the few novels that I was so disinterested in that I stopped reading it. I vote for Blood Meridian or Confederacy of Dunces. I'm surprised that David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest wasn't included as a multiple vote getter.

Of the list, I've never even heard of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, and I haven't read the following: Mating by Norman Rush, Underworld or Libra by Don DeLillo, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, The Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America both by Phillip Roth. Here's the list and runners up:

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." [Read A. O. Scott's essay. See a list of the judges.] Following are the results.

THE WINNER:

Beloved
Toni Morrison
(1987)

THE RUNNERS-UP:

Underworld
Don DeLillo
(1997)

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
(1985)

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
John Updike
(1995)

'Rabbit at Rest'
(1990)

'Rabbit Is Rich'
(1981)

'Rabbit Redux'
(1971)

'Rabbit, Run'
(1960)

American Pastoral
Philip Roth
(1997)

THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ALSO RECEIVED MULTIPLE VOTES:

A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
(1980)

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
(1980)

Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin
(1983)

White Noise
Don DeLillo
(1985)

The Counterlife
Philip Roth
(1986)

Libra
Don DeLillo
(1988)

Where I'm Calling From
Raymond Carver
(1988)

The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
(1990)

Mating
Norman Rush
(1991)

Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
(1992)

Operation Shylock
Philip Roth
(1993)

Independence Day
Richard Ford
(1995)

Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth
(1995)

Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy
(1999)

'Cities of the Plain'
(1998)

'The Crossing'
(1994)

'All the Pretty Horses'
(1992)

The Human Stain
Philip Roth
(2000)

The Known World
Edward P. Jones
(2003)

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
(2004)

Click here for the article which has links to reveiws on most of the books listed.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a novel inspired by science, although it is not readily apparent until more than halfway through the book. It is a sort of mediation on memory as Ishiguro reveals the plight of the Hailsham students bit by bit as one of the former students Kathy re-evaluates her school days at Hailsham and the plight of her classmates. What emerges is a story of the amorality of science and the dangers associated with advancement of science without proper consideration of the possible outcomes. I don’t want to say much more for fear of giving away the slowly unfolding twist of the story. I think he tells the story in a contemporary setting in order for the story to act as a model of what we could be facing in the near future-a kind of warning of the unintended consequences of scientific progress. I picked this book and put it down several times, which I think detracted from my enjoyment-I think it would have been more powerful if I had continued straight through it, but I wanted to read my book of the month selection on time as well. At any rate, Ishiguro proves that he is one of the better novelists writing today, he was short listed for the Booker Prize this year, which eventually went to John Banville for The Sea (which is currently sitting unread on my bookshelf). However, the only other novel I’ve read is the impressive Artist of the Floating World. At some point I’d like to get around to his other novels as well.

Interview: Neko Case

The Onion AV Club has a interview with Neko Case about her new album Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, which has been growing on me. The more I lsiten the more I like it, after initially not being so impressed:

Neko Case

Interviewed by Kyle Ryan
May 10th, 2006

Music history has innumerable examples of "next big thing" artists who never lived up to the expectations. Hype burns brightly but extinguishes quickly, and that can crush those who bought into it. The buzz around Neko Case has long called her a star in waiting, a songwriter with an inimitable voice who moves closer to the big time with each new record. As Case prepared her fifth album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, rumors circulated that it was her best yet—and they were right. A shoe-in for year-end best-of lists, Confessor expands Case's airy, country-leaning Americana into new spaces far beyond the alt-country template. During its opening week, Confessor sold 18,000 copies to debut at #54 on the Billboard Top 200, an unprecedented accomplishment for Case. Her new success has a lot to do with her move from a small indie (Bloodshot) to a big indie (Anti-), whose considerable resources have helped sustain the buzz.

But Case isn't buying any of it. She's the first to say she's too old and too clothed to land any arena tours—and she prefers it that way. Her punk-rock background gave her a DIY ethos, plus a desire to avoid the eviscerating limelight. Whether Confessor will boost her to new heights remains to be seen, but she's content where she is. Before she began her spring tour, she spoke to The A.V. Club about fame, turning 35, and the Green River Killer.

Click here to read the interview.