Bjork - Pj Harvey - Satisfaction (Full Song)

Some art is epiphany. In a first youtube post here on existential investigations, see two of my favourite artists, Björk and PJ Harvey. I don't know where this is from, but circumstantial evidence points to the BRIT awards in 1995.

The Day I beheld the Emperor of Japan

I was invited to watch the hatsubasho (the first Sumo tournament of the New Year) with my former host family. As we arrived in Ryôgoku, there was a huge commotion, snipers on roofs, helicopters circling, the whole place swarming with security personel (recognizable by the vacant look on their faces as they listen to commands uttered into their ears from some hidden headquarter). We expected either the Prime Minister or a member of the Imperial household, but when the limousine pulled up accompanied by two police details, behold! it was nobody else but the Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. There was a contagious burst of cheers and the obligatory waving. I was surprised at how tiny and frail they both seemed.
The Japanese national anthem 'Kimi ga yo' was played when they entered the hall and took their seats. Then the rikishi (the sumo wrestlers) entered the ring and were introduced one by one by country/prefecture of origin, stable and then name.
Funnily enough, of our party I was perhaps most excited about seeing them. My mother took a polite interest into the affairs of the Imperial family mostly based on compassion for the difficult lifes they are forced to lead. My host sister caught a few glances I can only describe as of the sort with which one merely registers some abstract unconnected fact . My host brother who seems to spend most of his days sleeping or staring into empty space, remained utterly indifferent.

Insomnia

Not being able to sleep: time seems to slow down, then to peter out slowly, eternity takes its place. All the other nights of insomnia come back to haunt me and the sheer load of those empty waking hours that parade in front of my inner eye sometimes seem enough to tip the careful balance of the mind towards insanity.
The house I used to live in in London was built almost entirely of wood and glass. I lived on the top floor in the triangular roof under a skylight and could see the trees in the garden swaying in the wind. On stormy nights the whole house would shake, the wind howling around the corners of my room, weather straight out of 'Wuthering Heights'. But I felt warm and comfortable curled up in my futon while outside the storm would lash the trees and the walls of my little hut.
Those were the romantic stormy nights I loved. But there were others too. The uncanny siblings of the stormy nights were the eerily quiet nights. Prolonged silence is very unusual in London, especially as we were living between Holloway Road and Liverpool Street and there was always a police siren or an ambulance in evidence somewhere. But some nights were different. The silence would slowly trickle into your brain and accumulated there at the threshold of sleep, becoming more ominous as it became longer. Eventually I would open my eyes, not tired and exhausted, but instantly fully awake, ears palpating the surroundings for noise, the senses sharpend and vivified. But none came. And sometimes a single leave would slide down the slating and create a disturbing, unearthly sound, as if somebody would scratch a single nail over the roof. The silence would thicken and become almost liquid. In such nights it was impossible to sleep.
The nights here in residential Western Tokyo are quiet to, but in a rather hushed and considerate way. There is nothing ominous about them. When unable to sleep I can hear the other tenants of the building move around or quietly talk to each other. The couple next door occasionally has sex, always between four and five in the morning. This starts with strange, high-pitched wimpering noises that last for a few minutes and then stop, only to start again a few minutes later, a slow crescendo towards the inevitable peak, at which the bed starts banging against the wall and it generally sounds as if some maniac was tourturing a cat by trying to squeeze it between the bed and the wall.

Tokyo Landscape VII

Altre Shinagawa, the new development around Shinagawa station at sunset. Was on my way back from the notorious Immigration office where my visa was extended till March. And it only took three hours!

Quote of the Day I

'Truth seldom has received and, I fear, never will receive much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known and more rarely welcome.'

John Locke

All the Best in the New Year to You All

We are already one week into the new year and it is freeeeeezing here in Tokyo. I am not quite sure where I am going with this blog. First the idea of just posting completely anonymous random thoughts appealed to me, but now my fieldwork does not allow for too much pointless rambling. Also, to maintain a readership one needs to post regularily and for a certain audience. So I thought this would be a good tool to keep in touch with friends in Germany, England, Switzerland and America. But so far, only my parents are reading it and thus I am strangely self-conscious about blogging.
Anyway, I decided to open two new categories in order to post more frequently. One being the obvious random photo shots; the other, somewhat more pretentious, is 'Quote of the Day'. These are as random as the rest, just thoughts that I thought were worth disseminating (like the stuck-up English snob that people sometimes take me to be, talking about 'sharing these meaningful thoughts with the blogging community' just feels as if a fishbone was stuck in my throat).
And now to something completely different: For those interested in my research, I just published a short account/memo/text on the New York University blog Material World. CHeck it out at http://www.materialworldblog.com/

Tokyo Landscape VI

Shinjuku Station Higashiguchi on a Winter Night

New Year's Impressions III

For this particuliar impression I have to rely completely on the artificial memory of my camera, as I have no bloody idea when or where I took it.

New Year's Impressions II

I spent last hour of the old year and the first of the new one practising Aikidô at the Hombu-Dôjô, the world headquarter of the Aikikai. The grandson of the founder directed the traditional Toshikoshi-Geiko.

New Year's Impressions I

This is how we spent the First Day of the Year. After a huge feast of New Year's dishes, copious amounts of Sake, Beer and Shochû and watching the Vienna Philharmonics perform the traditional New Year's concert the Majong board comes out . My little brother usually drinks a few glasses of beer in quick succession and then falls asleep. In the second picture you can see that my grandmother has joined him and they both have a good snooze.

Seasonal Dilemmas

It is the middle of December, but in Japan the weather was so mild this autumn that the foliage of the trees did no reach their peak until now. Viewing autumn colors is almost as important as viewing cherry blossoms in spring and inextricably linked to the Japanese feeling for the seasons as extolled in numberless Nihonron, which basically are theories about the Japanese written by Japanese to be read by Japanese in order to find out what is Japanese about the Japanese. The unseasonable warmth however has led to a terrible mix up of autumn colors and Christmas ornaments, not to mention Christmas carols that are inflicted upon everyone daring to step into any sort of public location.

Local Elections

It is quite interesting to compare the different expressions politicians or/and their consultants think will endear them to the general public. Some smiles are friendly and warm, some are inane and irritating, some border on the lunatic fringe. It also seems to be quite important to have proper Japanese black hair, preferably a lot of it.
Hair in politics might be an interesting topic. I remember the female Thai candidate who ran for local office in Ayuthaya and whose campaign seemed to rely entirely on a huge majestic hairdo that was prominently displayed even in local tuk-tuks. As if Margret Thatcher and her hairstyle, described by Alan Hollinghurst as 'a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticist and the Baroque' (in 'The Line of Beauty'), were the embodiment of some mythical 'hair of power'. It is true that the Prime Minister's hairdo grew over the years out of all proportions and rumour has it that the Baroness was determined to outdo the Queen, in the absence of a crown with pure hair, it seems. The rivalry between the two female heads of state in the 80's is often remarked upon: Apparently the Queen wouldn't let the PM sit during the weekly audiences. There was a brief but telling newsclip on telly when Baroness Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday two years ago. When her car drove up to the Mandarin Oriental, she had to use a walking stick and was supported on one side. The Queen, sitting in her Bentley behind her obviously saw this display of frailty and as if to make a point of it, she burst out of her car, literally 'jumped' out of it with a victorious smile.....

Backstage

As I am currently re-reading Goffman's brilliant 'Presentation of Self in Everyday Life', I thought this picture might be appropriate. It is a view of the stage of the National Theatre in Hanzômon, seen from backstage. While many houses in Europe and America are designed to be representative of the inhabitant's taste and sophistication (and often horribly fail in doing so), Japanese interiors are to a much larger degree 'backstage' to their presentation of self. It is not very common to entertain guests at one's house and if one does so, the guest only enters the small part of the house that is made representative through preparation. Interestingly, that space for formal visits is usually not used by the rest of the family at all. It always struck me as slightly odd that my hostfamily and me would sit in the crammed kitchen while there was a large empty tatami room just on the other side of the corridor. Over time I realised that it is precisely this backstage setting that made me part of the family and that I sometimes disrupted by being to formal and polite.

Treacherous Objects

How we are depending on objects to convey the 'right' message to those who see them as belonging to us! I remember a birthday party of a friend in his new, self-remade flat in Stuttgart. As an architect and 'Bildungsbürger', he paid utmost attention to all details, from the lavish art tomes on the bookshelves to the miniature reproductions of antique statues. There was, however, on the central shelf of a glass cabinet, a small Egyptian obelisk complete with hieroglyphs in rather too colourful shades. It stood out like a sore thumb among all the rest and I was drawn to it almost magically. I felt a peculiar thrill at immediately finding the object that by not belonging there exposed some of the pretence and at the same time was shocked by being such an interior Nazi. As the evening progressed and everybody got blissfully drunk, I asked the host about this 'éclipse du goût' and he confessed that the obelisk was one of the few concessions he had to make for his much younger boyfriend whose possessions and 'youthful taste' were apparently underrepresented. When I later met the boyfriend himself, I couldn't help but feel that he shared the obelisk's lot in this artsy, 30-something crowd.

Tokyo Landscape V

This is the view from the top floor of the Tokyo University Library in Komaba where I sometimes ponder the more irritating problems of rubbish fieldword. You can see the Park Hyatt's triple towers followed on the far left by the Tokyo Opera City in Hatsudai.

Tokyo Landscape IV

It is still unseasonally warm and pleasant. This is Ochanomizu at 8 o'clock in the morning. Looks almost picturesque for Tokyo.

Tokyo Landscape III

Early winter sunset over the Park Hyatt, Shinjuku's recent new landmark building. The hype created by Sophie Coppola's film 'Lost in Translation' disguises that fact that it is done in a rather bland corporate style. Rumor has it that there is a huge pool under one of the glas pyramids...

For Those in Need of Cheering Up

DO you sometimes feel you are the most overeducated, useless person on the planet? Do you fear you are too intellectual to sustain an everyday conversation without drifting off to the problem of transubstantiation or Foucauldian anecdotes? Do you suffer from 'the lonesome Oxbridge blues'? Then I suggest you go and read the personal ads in 'The London Review of Books'. You’ll feel redeemed and charmingly reassured of your own averageness.

A little sample:

'The song that most puts me in the mood for love is Rick Dee’s Disco Duck. Woman, 54, clinging desperately to the erotic undertones of a 1976 historical society Christmas party chance dancefloor encounter.'

'Previoulsy affable, now largely intolerant and recently divorced woman (34) WLTM a bloke my age who doesn’t spend 15 hours a day pretending he’s a heroic blacksmith killing stuff in some other-dimensional village resembling Cottingley circa 1902. Talk to me, not Olaf the Destroyer.'

And my personal favourite:

'I am not as high maintenance as my highly polished and impeccably arranged collection of porcelain cats suggests, but if you touch them I will kill you. F, 36. Likes porcelain cats.'

Tokyo Landscape II

This is the NOA building in Azabudai, shot through a cab window. With its red brick base and lip stick shape it is a peculiar appearance in the jumbled faceless cityscape of Tokyo. It was designed by Shirai Seiichi in1974 and has in my opinion grown old rather more gracefully than many a postmodern concoction.

Tokyo Landscape I

This is one of the buildings next to Shinjuku station no one ever notices. But on second glance it is actually quite interesting in a 60's sort of way. Could be a villain's headquarter in an early James Bond film.