Lost In Translation

Vampire Weekend: Contra

Contra is the first great album of 2010. It is full of infectious energy just like Vampire Weekend's eponymous debut. More afro-pop with catchy guitar hooks and interesting senseless lyrics. My favorite songs so far are "Diplomat's Son" and "Horchata." But I also think "Run," "Giving Up The Gun," and "Holiday" are well crafted songs as well.

Blacows

Blacows is a well-known gourmet burger joint in Ebisu. I think they have one of the best hamburger patties (100% Japanese Black Wagyu Beef), delicious handmade buns, the Colby and Monterrey Jack cheese combo is great, but the special sauce was average and I think it would behoove all Tokyo gourmet joint to pass on the ketchup and mustard packets for squeeze bottles. Overall, it comes highly rated burgers-among the best in Tokyo.

In The Loop

In The Loop is a great little comedy that is something like West Wing without all the schmaltzy drama. I thought it had great sequences and some great performances from the ensemble cast which apparently includes several actors from the BBC series, The Thick Of It, which it was based on. I particularly liked Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Foster and Chris Addison as his aide Toby. It chronicles the political shenanigans that go on during a gear up for a war in the Middle East between the American and British governments. Typically clever and subtle British humor ensues.

Everything I Ever Really Needed To Know I Learned From The Yakuza Or Cops

Jake Adelstein's post with the title above ran January 25th on his Japan Subculture Research Center blog. Here is the gist of what he is saying in this first installment:

“When you’re a yakuza or a reporter or a cop, people count on you to keep your word, to do what you’ve said you’ll do.  In our business, sometimes we got to war—over turf, over money, over a meaningless quarrel. But that’s part of the business. If we’re going to bump heads with the Kokusuikai and one of my soldiers says that he’ll be at his post at seven pm sharp and he’s not there—what do you think will happen? Maybe the guy he’s supposed to back up will have to go in alone—maybe his buddy will get killed.  Maybe we’ll lose the chance to make the strike. Apologies don’t cut it. You’re a reporter, you have deadlines.  If you don’t meet your deadline—what happens? Can you just blow it off? Do you think your editor will just say, ‘no problem, we’ll just leave part of the paper blank.’  I don’t think so. You can get fired for things like that.  I don’t know how it is in America, and maybe I don’t know how it is for the civilians but for us, a man’s word is the most important thing in the world.  You need to learn not to promise things lightly and to know the difference between promises you can’t keep and promises you don’t keep.  Nine times out of ten, the failure to keep a promise is in yourself, not something you can blame on the world.”

I nodded once more but I think I smirked a little and he raised his finger and pointed at me quite forcefully and said, “And when you break a promise, you need to show in your attitude that you are sincerely sorry. And you should try to make amends.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“I’d like you to listen to what I’ve told you and take it to heart.  If people don’t think they can trust you, you will never be a good reporter. You have to show them that they can trust you. Every little promise you keep, every time you’re punctual, every time you do something that you said you would do—you build trust. And every missed appointment, every favor you forget, every loan you fail to repay, every time you say you’ll call and don’t—these things add up.  You do some things right.  But you still don’t get it. Think about what I’m saying. And we’ll call it even.”

I think there is a lot of truth in this idea of keeping promises and I like to think that I have a done a fairly decent job of doing so. And he says he wants to write back to everyone that has written about his book or written him a letter, but has been swamped with work. On his behalf, he is one of about a half dozen that has posted on my blog about their books that I have blogged about, so he's not doing so bad.

Sun And Steel

Sun and Steel a nonfiction work by Yukio Mishima is a difficult work to categorize. I was compelled to read it in connection with research I am doing related to Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Schrader used excerpts from the long essay (manifesto?) that is a mediation on the fusing of life and art. I think it provides a lot of insight into the mind and philosophy of Mishima at the end of his life when he was obsessed with body building, training with his private army, and contemplating life and death. He talks about the fusion of mind and body and analyzes several important life experiences that were physical sensations like running at dawn, parachuting, and flying in a jet fighter. I’m not sure this book would be interesting or digestible for a novice in the work of Mishima, but for anyone who has knowledge of his remarkable life and body of work it is invaluable in the understading of such a  complicated artist.

M's Curry

M's Curry located on the shotengai in Sasazuka always has a line, so I thought I'd wait and see what it was all about. It's a very small shop (only about 12 seats and the curry is hand made by one cook). The homemade salad dressing was very garlicy and tasty. I had the chicken curry and it was supposed to be spicy, but I thought it was pretty mild and not thick enough for Japanese curry. Now I know what all the fuss is about I don't think I'd wait in line for it again.

 

 

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is one of the finest films of 2009 and probably deserves to win the Oscar. I think the film is excellent on several levels. It is a suspenseful procedural portrayal of an elite unit’s life and death work. It is also a very accurate portrayal of the life of soldiers in hostile countries. It is also a psychological examination of an adrenaline junkie who finds it hard to live in the confines of normal society where the mundane is the status quo. It could also operate as a very subtle anti-war film, in that the senseless death and psychological effects of an insurgent war are effective played out on the screen. I would say that it is required viewing.

Outliers

I have to admit I had been getting a little tired of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing style with his New Yorker pieces, for example: “How are quarterbacks and dog fighting connected…well let’s take a look at...” But a friend told me that Outliers was his best written book to date, so I though I’d give it a chance. The thing is that he does really interesting research and his writing style is very easily digested, so I was really entertained by this book despite having already read a chapter in The New Yorker online. I particularly liked the chapters “The Ethnic Theory Of Plane Crashes” and his mother’s story recounted in “A Jamaican Story.” You can ‘t go wrong with Gladwell, he's informative and entertaining.

The Searchers

John Ford is often touted as one of the giants of modern cinema, and recently I read where Paul Schrader said that The Searchers was influential to several of his films. So I recently watched it, and I pretty sure I have seen it before as a child on TV.  I was mostly struck by the weaknesses I saw in the film: inauthentic period clothing, unrealistic caricatures and stereotypes, obvious stage sets, the unrealistic story line of the captured girl, etc. I guess context is important. But I don’t have it since I am not familiar with all the films made before and after. It is said that he was a master of using locations and that was evident as were some of the artistically framed shots, including the final scene where John Wayne is framed in the doorway as he leaves the family behind. That being said I liked this one much better than Rio Grande, which I saw a few years back in an effort to appreciate the work of John Ford. I though Grapes of Wrath was a fine film, so it might be that westerns aren’t necessarily my thing. However, that being said I really enjoyed Sam Peckinpa’s The Wild Bunch. 

Japanese Paternalism

Colin Jones makes some good points in his criticism of Japanese family law in the second installment of his two part series. Take this point:

For example, for a number of years there was a somewhat surreal academic debate in Japan over whether visitation was a right of the parent, the child (as is the view of courts in some countries) or something else. In its second decision on visitation, the Supreme Court held in 2000 that visitation was a right of neither parent nor child. Rather, it was a parent's right to ask the court to do something, like awarding visitation — maybe. Effectively, visitation is a privilege granted to deserving and cooperative parents by generous judges. This is a perfectly rational decision from the standpoint of a judicial bureaucracy: To officially identify any sort of substantive right in the parent-child relationship would involve unnecessarily binding courts in future cases. Litigants would start to demand visitation as a right, whereas many judges would probably rather bestow it after being asked nicely.

As a result, there is likely a very basic disconnect when, for example, a father starts mediation seeking contact with his child and is told that, if all goes well, the Family Court might have a go at "trial visitation" — maybe an hour or two in the family court playroom, under the supervision of courtroom personnel. Those working for the court doubtless feel they are working hard to "give" the father time with his child. Many parents, however, are likely to be enraged by the presumption behind the notion of being "given" an hour of "trial" visitation with a child they might have been living with until a few weeks ago.

The family court personnel no doubt also consider themselves to be protecting the rights of the child — there might be assertions of abuse, the visitation might turn into an abduction (or counter-abduction); all sorts of terrible things could happen, so a presumption of guilt may be the safest course — for the court, at least, since it means it will not be blamed for any negative result. The ability of courts to be "safe" in this fashion would be jeopardized if visitation were any sort of fundamental right, since then the court would be participating in its infringement.

This is just wrong. It is also very typical. The Japanese fashion of covering one's ass at the expense of other's rights. A bureaucratic mentality that focuses on making it easy on those working in the system rather than those who the system is supposed to benefit. You see this type of paternalism all over in Japanese society-for example not telling patients about terminal illness and telling their family members to also keep it from the patient.