Lost In Translation

Cops Vs. Thugs

It seems 1975 was a busy year for director Kinji Fukasaku, he directed four films (Graveyard of Honor, Gambling Den Heist, and New Battles Without Humanity: The Boss's Head) including, Cops Vs.Thugs. Bunta Sugawara stars as Kuno, a cop with suspiciously close ties to the yakauza. He is particularly close to Hirotani (Hirokoi Matsukata), whom he let go several years prior and is his main contact within the yakuza. Things begin to change as new blood is brought in to combat the yakuza, a young brash officer, Kaida (Tatsuo Umemiya) is put in charge of the investigation into shady land dealings with the yakuza-his first line of order is to separate those cops with close ties to the yakuza so that he can help undermine a yakuza land deal that will be taken over by a straight corporation. The end result is a war with the yakuza with several causalities and when the dust settles several characters have been killed, locked up, demoted and promoted to a job with the straight company that ends up taking over the land bid. So the films seems to suggest that the old school close ties/corruption approach to dealing with the yakuza is preferable to the modern approach which results in a violent disruption of society. Furthermore, the subtext is that the police is much more concerned with communists than yakuza-perhaps because I read that the film was supposed to be set in 1963, but the overall feel is very 70s from the clothes, hairstyles, and music.

Agaru Sagaru Nishi-Iru Higashi-Iru

Dinner was at Agaru Sagaru Nishi-Iru Higashi-Iru, a modern kaiseki restaurant in Harajuku. The starter was marinated deep fried greenling, mushroom, and onion.

Stewed chicken and eggplant with sesame sauce.

The Broiled seasonal fish, stewed pork belly, Japanese rolled egg, deep fried bamboo shots, deep fried yuba (tofu skin),  chilled sweet potato soup, sakura shrimp and broad beans in soybean and sesame sauce, and asparagus with sesame cream sauce.

Japanese beef cutlet with onion sauce.

Seasonal cooked rice with pickles and darkbrown miso soup.

Kudzu starch with mango sauce.

Me and Jennifer Jones.

Tokyo Tour: Yanaka, Ueno, and Omotesando

An old friend was visiting from Seattle so we started in Yanaka for a tour of the old town.

Hantei, an old house converted into a restaurant. We tried to have lunch here, but it was fully booked-so we continued onto Ueno.

The pond at Ueno Park.

The boxed lunch at Izuei near Ueno pond.

The Saigo Takamori statue in Ueno park.

The approach to the Nezu Museum.

The garden behind the Nezu museum.

The Hole

There were a few things that I found surprising about Ming-liang Tsai's entertaining film The Hole (1998). For one, it has humor and is also partially a musical-the woman living downstairs from the hole in the apartment ceiling in the film, Kuei-Mei Yang, channels a former 50s Hong Kong singing movie star Grace Chang in several musical interludes throughout the film. (Here's a taste). These songs remind me of the nostalgia for Caribbean influenced music seen in Wong Kar-wai films like Days of Being Wild and In The Mood for Love. This is in strict contrast to his previous film, The River, that was one of his bleakest. That is not to say that there isn't any alienation or misery in this film, just that there are breaks from it and the film ends on an upbeat note. But the same alienating bleak atmosphere of modern Taiwan is on full display as usual with a new caveat-a new virus is wiping people out but not before they adopt cockroach-like symptoms in the steady unstopping rain-a familiar Tsai motif. It also clocks in at a lean 95 minutes, brief for a Tsai film. It also stars his favorite collaborator, Kang-sheng Lee, as the equally isolated and alienated man upstairs who saves the woman from her despair.

Simple Style

I had lunch at a trendy little cafe, Simple Style near Tokyo Joshidai in Nishi Ogikubo. Eggplant and chicken butter curry with a salad for ¥880-not bad at all.

The Battle For Okinawa

I have read a couple of books by American soldiers about the bloody battle for Okinawa in WWII that many suggest was the catalyst for dropping atomic bombs on Japan to prevent a contracted war of attrition in Japan after invasion. So it was an interesting to get the perspective of a high ranking Japanese officer who was leading the Japanese forces in the battle of Okinawa in The Battle For Okinawa (1995 originally written in Japanese in 1972) by Colonel Hiromichi Yahara with an introduction and commentary by Frank B. Gibney (a former WWII POW interrogator). In many ways the memoir is self-serving, Yahara has an agenda to set two things straight: 1) that he was not a coward for not killing himself and allowing himself to be captured and 2) that he was one of the few commanding officers who rejected the banzai attack offensives and wait for air power approach to save the day strategy. Furthermore, he was correct in thinking that Okinawa would probably be the next target rather than Taiwan as many of his peers thought. The defeat in that the the strategic defensive (attrition warfare) and all-out offensive (direct confrontation) plans constantly collided leaving them without a consistent war plan. Some other trends appear throughout the memoir, the utter disregard for the lives of Okinawans: "For want of antitank weapons, we had to use Okinawan conscripts armed with bamboo spears. They were destroyed in one day." Yahara didn't seem to lose much sleep over civilian causalities or deaths of comfort women and nurses that he witnessed. In fact he mentions that he had studied in America for two years and found the propaganda spread among the Okinawans about the brutal nature of their enemy would result in widespread rape, torture, and death. A policy that hey sometimes enforced with force. He knew it was absurd but did nothing to stop the spread of such nonsense. Here's a sample of the mentality of the high command, when the commanding General Cho wrote his last orders he added this postscript: "Do not suffer shame of being taken prisoner. You will live for eternity." Yahara saw the folly of such an order and muses about this concept and ask serious questions such as: must one hundred soldiers die because of this tradition of avoiding shame? He suggests that their leaders only seemed to care about preservation of their own status, prestige, and honor. All in all a fascinating account of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific theater in WWII.

A Report On The Party And The Guests

It seems that Czechoslovakia had their own cinematic New wave in the 60s, and two films from there made Renata Adler's Best of List for 1968 from her book A Year in the Dark. However, I was only able to rack down Jan Nemec's film A Report OnThe Party And The Guests from 1966 (the other film was The Fifth Horseman Is Fear directed by Zbynek Brynch). This lean film, 71 minutes, is a sort of parable: in that it has less to do with a particular authoritarian regime than it does with the tenuous nature of human freedom, and the potential of people to let themselves be lead to a prescribed system of thought, a certain pattern of behavior. Němec has said to have cited Kafka as a formative influence, and Party can be seen as a direct attempt to find a cinematic version of Kafka's literary style. The unexplained-imprisonment scenario calls to mind Kafka's classic The Trial, but it has been suggested that it is closer in spirit to one of Kafka’s Zurau Aphorisms: “a cage went in search of a bird.” 

2016 JALT Pan SIG Conference in Nago, Okinawa

So this was the view from my hotel, Hotel Resonex Nago, where I was staying for the 2016 Pan SIG Conference at Meio University. This is my third trip to Okinawa, so I didn't do much of the touristy stuff, since I've seen most of the major sites already on previous visits and Nago is 90 minutes from Naha-where the majority of the sites are located.

The entrance to the hotel.

Tropical plants adorn the hotel grounds.

At Meio University.

Roast pork at the after conference buffet.

 Exquisite vegetable and fruit carvings for the buffet.

Fresh sashimi.

The entertainment Okinawan minyo.

Awamori, the local hootch.

Kintaro izakaya in old toen Nago-shi.

More of the local stuff-chased by water.

Shisha lion guard dog.

Bistro 24-the happening izakaya in downtown Nago.

Last meal in Okinawa-Okinawa sob and juji (fried rice).

Cafe de R

This is a very local place, it is next door to my apartment, and they have a very nice chicken curry for ¥800 with a salad.

Japan: Land Of Myths And Legends

I recently discovered Alan Booth's two seminal books on Japan (The Roads to Sata and Looking for the Lost) and a friend also recommended his highly subjective guidebook, Japan: Land Of Myths And Legends (1992) which is sadly out of print. Why sadly? This is a general overview of Japan and even though it was written in 1992, it still offers some refreshingly and highly accurate opinions on Japan and Japanese society. It is spiritually akin to Donald Richie's classic To the Inland Sea (which is also a highly subject book with several opinionated views on Japan and its society). Booth's text is accompanied by some stunning photographs by photographer Ken Straiton and selected passages culled from a variety of writers (foreigners and Japanese authors in translation) throughout the book (e.g. Lafcadio Hearne, Pierre Loti, Commodore Perry, Yasunari Kawabata, Murasaki Shibata, Richard Gordon Smith, Katsuzo Osda, Shimazaki Toson, Eugene Herrigel, Kenzaburo Oe, Isabella Bird, John Davide Morely). Furthermore there are special passages explaining different aspects of Japanese culture and customs: Japanese Theater, Religion in Japan, Tohoku's Four Great Summer Festivals, Japanese Music, Lavatories, Baths, and Other Headaches, Arts, Martial and Polite. The book is organized by regions and Booth starts with the most popular Tokyo and the Kanto Region, Nara, Kyoto and the Kinki Region, The Tohoku Region, The Chubu Region, Hiroshima and the Chugoku Region, The Inland Sea and Shikoku, Kyushu and ending with Okinawa and the Southern Islands. In the Tokyo and Kanto region he has divided the section into smaller subsections: Tokyo: History, Size, Crowds, Chaos Character, Historical Tokyo, Institutional Tokyo, Fluid Tokyo, Tokyo's Islands, and The Rest of the Kanto Region. And in Nara, Kyoto and the Kinki Region, the subsection s are: The Ancient Capitals, their History, their Primacy, Nara, In Nara Prefecture, Kyoto, Kyoto: The Skin, Kyoto: The Belly, Kyoto: The Bones, Festive Kyoto, In Kyoto Prefecture, The Rest of the Kinki Region. Some of the other sections also have subsections as well. I have to say that I was impressed that Booth points out that in the Hiroshima section that the atomic bomb memorials are presented entirely out of context with no suggestions that they were engaged in a war of aggression-a person with no knowledge about the war would have thought the bomb was dropped on Japan without provocation. In his book, The Roads To Sata, he writes of being upset by the war museum, so he obviously did some reading and soul searching since then (I believe it was some 15-20 years earlier). He also suggests that visitor do some serious reading about it before making rash judgements about the event-which I feel was a bold move in 1992 (the publication of the book)-the height of the Hiroshima Revisionists movement (critics who suggested that Japan would have surrender soon without the provocation of the bombs).

There are some great observations throughout the book, so I'd like to highlight some of the most interesting ones:

"More thorough nonsense must be spoken and written about Japan than about any comparably developed nation."

Regarding the two main results of sakoku (the Japanese national policy of seclusion from 1634-1854: "The first was an almost mystical attachment to one's 'home country' (furasato)." "The second result was that travel to distant parts of the country obtained an aura of romance which has hardly diminished in modern times."

"An all-year-round phenomena is the supposed difficulty raised by the 'language barrier', though this tends to weigh more heavily on the Japanese consciousness than it does on the average foreign visitor.

"The Nichgeki Music Hall in Yurakucho was not so fortunate and is the most recent of the capital's well-known landmarks to vanish, having been replaced by a vast prison-like building called Yurakucho Mullion, housing newspaper offices, banks, a concert hall, five cinemas and two department stores."

"Many of Hakone's hotels earn most of their income not from couples or families, but from large groups, such as associations of traders, who arrive en masse in hired buses and get as helplessly drunk as they can in the shortest possible time. This is called experiencing nature."

"But nor can there be any doubt in a sane mind that the cities of Nara and Kyoto together cradle, nursery and full-blown flower of Japanese culture. To avoid them or omit them for want of time is an act of stupendous folly."

"Kyoto's beauty is not like Nara's-monumental, expansive,public. Kyoto's beauty is elusive  and has to be sought out with patience and forethought."

"Osaka's chief contribution to Japanese life has been the unapologetic, cut-throat mercantile instinct."

"Eventually Japanese bureaucrats will probably draw up a hierarchical list of the 'Three Most Beautiful Suspension Bridges' and their 'Eight Most Scenic Struts.'"

"Japanese people are wont to bemoan Westerner's alleged habit of regarding Mount Fuji and geisha girls as the twin symbols of the nation while willfully ignoring the cultural assets that the Japanese themselves are most proud, such as silicon chips."

"As with certain beautiful women, it is best to maintain as distant a relationship as possible with Mount Fuji. Not to see it is a deprivation, but to see it too close is to court the waning of a dream."

"The Japanese often complain...about their shimaguni konjo (islander's complex), by which they mainly mean their insular cast of thought that comes from being entirely surrounded by the sea. The 'consequences of this complex have been many--notably, the forced closure of the country under the Tokugawas, and at all other periods the impulse to simultaneously distrust, admire, resists, and possess anything and everything that comes from abroad."

"Nor can one be long in the Peace Park (Hiroshima) and its museum without noticing a number of unsettling circumstances, chief of which, perhaps, is the complete absence of any historical context. It is as though the bomb fell on Hiroshima, figuratively as well as literally, out of the blue."

"As Nagasaki's bomb is the forgotten bomb compared with Hiroshima's, so Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands is, as far as tourism is concerned, the forgotten island."

"Older residents of of Sapporo treasure found memories of an avenue called entertainment quarter, famous throughout the island for its geisha, who found no difficulty in relieving patrons of the contents of their wallets with as much facility as the badger, an animal noted in folklore for its skill in  that field."

"The Tokyo bus system is wonderfully arcane, and the newcomer is advised to train himself on the madalas of the Shingon sect before attempting to tackle it."

"A bar in Japan usually denotes a place where your drink will be poured for you by a 'hostess' who will sit beside you, flatter you, accept your offer of drinks in return, and charge you five times more than you ever dreamed of paying. ata cabert, in return for the entire contents of your wallet, you will be permitted to grope the hostess under the table."

So there is a strong sense of Booth and his perspective on Japan in this book that makes it noteworthy. Although some of the information is outdated, it is an enjoyable and informative look at a complicated and fascinating country through the eyes of an irreverent Englishman.