Music Review: 'One Night Carnival' by Kishidan

I only ever watch the Japanese pop charts to see the videos of cute girl singers. But, just occasionally, among all the derivative pop fluff, something truly unique and Japanese stands out, like Kishidan.
Defined as 'Yank Rock,' you might expect them to be even more derivative, but somehow dressing in high school uniforms with giant 50s rockabilly quiffs and doing complex dance routines while singing “Can you master baby?” is as Japanese as sushi. Instead of trying to look like chain-wearing, baggy-trousered American hoodlums, Kishidan represent an indigenous bad boy image of high school delinquency and bosozoku. None of this would mean a thing if they weren’t any good, but musically Kishidan are a tight band with a lot of tricks. "One Night Carnival," the title track of this maxi single, is one of the catchiest songs you’ll hear, with some great, fluid guitar playing; while "Guri to gura" starts out sounding like Cream before funking out, revealing the complexity of their musical underpinnings. Also check out their major first album released back in April, "1/6 Lonely Night."

Tokyo Journal
July 2002

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Mean Beans

Everybody knows the story of cheese: a man put some milk in a leather bag, got on his horse, and rode a few hundred miles. When he got to the end of his journey, he was surprised to find that he had a bag of cheese. The story of natto is remarkably similar, except there was no leather bag to contain the soy beans. Instead, the rider placed them on his saddle and sat on them the whole way. In this way, by the end of his journey, the beans had been transformed into natto, with its distinctive, disgusting aroma.

So, next time someone asks you if you've tried natto yet, don't fidget and fumble and feel guilty that you haven't tried out another culture to the full. Just laugh in their face at the outlandishness of their suggestion, or scream hysterically at the horror of their indecent proposal. Natto is not culture. It is the essence of evil incarnate in food form, and the sooner everyone realizes this, the better.

Because it TASTES so bad and SMELLS so bad, and even looks, feels and sounds so bad, people harbor the view that it must have some redeeming features. Hence the notion that it must be good for you! Strangely enough, this theory isn't encouraged if you're drinking from a can of oolong tea that smells or tastes bad, especially if you've just bought it from a supermarket with inadequate surveillance equipment. For my own part, I prefer to stick to the simple rule that stops me eating soap powder, chewing erasers, and licking the bald pates of salarymen: if it TASTES bad, it IS bad.

The truth is that natto is popular by conspiracy. It serves a deeper, more sinister purpose. Like kanji and squat toilets, it is a device designed to exclude foreigners from Japanese society, making it virtually impossible for us to assimilate. It is a barrier dividing us from each other and isolating Japan from the rest of the world. So, in the name of international brotherhood and basic culinary decency, I call upon the inhabitants of Japan, foreign and native alike, to take to the streets and root out the evil that is among us. I will not rest content until every last festering bean has been consumed by the avenging flames. Remember, Mr. Natto, you can run but you can't hide—not the way you smell, anyway.

Tokyo Classified
October 17, 1998

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Superflat Paper Tiger: The Art of Takashi Murakami

Japanese art has two compartments. First, there is the art that exists largely within a Japanese context. Then there is the art that, somehow or other, finds its way onto the international stage, and, by so doing, becomes representative of the country. Interestingly, much of the art in the first category consists of a slavish though skillful cribbing of foreign styles, as well as traditional art created with little thought for a wider market.

Japanese art that has been able to transcend the narrow confines of the domestic market and achieve a wide foreign audience has also usually been traditional: Hokusai and Hiroshige for example. But in this category you can occasionally find examples of non– traditional art that, for one reason or another, has managed to make the transition from local to international.

Chief among these rare success stories is Takashi Murakami. Running to May 2009, “© Murakami,” a major retrospective of his work is now touring the US, with further stops scheduled in Germany and Spain. This exhibition will further strengthen the impression that here is a Japanese artist with mass overseas appeal who isn’t some 18th–century woodblock carver in a kimono.

A lavishly illustrated book–cum–catalog has been published to accompany this series of exhibitions. The five lengthy essays included in the text are designed to help you understand why Murakami has succeeded where so many others have failed, but only if you read between the lines, because exhibition catalogues are hardly disinterested and impartial documents.

This makes this book a delight for those who like deconstructing their language and looking for hidden subtexts. As with much art writing, there is plenty of impressive–sounding, but vacuous, open–ended language. The Director’s Foreword for example invokes the usual adventurous clichés about art that goes “beyond its traditional boundaries,” and praises Murakami for being “revelatory” and “transformative,” without bothering to hint at what he might be revealing or transforming.

Such laudations might prompt you to take a look at the art itself. As the pictures show, Murakami creates large cartoonish canvases in acrylic and plastic sculptures, both of which have a pristine manufactured look, as if the products of some Disneyesque production line.

This is no accident. One of the points made in the far–ranging essay “Flat Boy vs. Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle for Japan” by British media theorist Dick Hebdige, is that Murakami has taken Andy Warhol’s concept of the ‘art factory’ and made it a reality. According to its website, Kaikai Kiki, the art production company that executes Murakami’s artistic visions, employs roughly 50 people in its Tokyo headquarters and 20 people in its New York office and studio. This has enabled Murakami to extend his ‘Business Art’ into many areas, including the manufacturing and marketing of figurines based on his art and designs for the international luggage brand Louis Vuitton.

But if Murakami’s art operates on an industrial scale that has more in common with Disney than Warhol, there is certainly nothing ‘Disneyesque’ about the centerpieces of the exhibition: the otaku–influenced “Hiropon” (1997), a 71–inch tall acrylic fiberglass figurine of a naked young girl, squeezing what looks like a skipping rope of milk from her enormous breasts, and the host–boy–inspired “My Lonesome Cowboy” (1998) a male equivalent that creates a lasso from his ejaculate.

In his essay “Making Murakami,” the exhibition’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel draws an analogy between the dynamic liquid aspects of these works and that of Hokusai’s “Great Wave” from “The Thirty-Six Views of Fuji.”

One of the problems of contemporary art is that it demands to be judged on its own terms, without any transcendent standard of excellence or taste. The problem becomes more pronounced in the case of an artist like Murakami as we are thrown off balance by its strangeness or get caught up in the enthusiasm with which it is treated by critics reluctant to tackle the complex interlinked phenomena of his ouvre by imposing familiar standards that might backfire. In essence, this is Orientalism applied backwards and often gives Murakami a critical free ride.

Murakami’s art may be ‘kawaii’ (cute), amusing, and even occasionally breathtaking, but there is also much to criticize in its artificiality, repetitiveness, smugness, and its distasteful reliance upon ‘otaku’ (geek) culture. The fact that it largely escapes more rigorous censure is a testament to Murakmi’s ultimate skill in understanding and manipulating the international art market and its intelligentsia. The key in this is his concept of “Superflat,” a variable concept that serves to mystify his creations and protect them from normal Western art criticism.

But just what is “Superflat”? Dick Hebdige’s essay nails down its defining characteristics. These include: (1) the flatness found in traditional Japanese painting; (2) “decentering decorative” effects, also from traditional Japanese art; (3) the lack of Western distinctions, like art/craft or high art/ low art; (4) the flatness found in digital imaging; and (5) “the ground-zero flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the nuclear strikes of 1945.”

The last aspect is of particular interest. As we learn form Paul Schimmel’s essay, Murakami’s mother was living in the Western Japanese city of Kokura in 1945 when a B-29 bomber set out to obliterate it with the second A–bomb of the war. Only an accident of weather deflected the bomber from its original target to Nagasaki.

Looking at Murakami’s “Superflat” as Hebdige does, by specifying its salient features, is revealing. The demystified concept loses its power and we realize that it lacks any real aesthetic or philosophical merit. Instead, it emerges as a connotatative system designed to evoke a tolerant or even apologetic response from liberal Western collectors, curators, and art critics. It certainly has this effect on Hebdige himself. Despite providing a useful dissection of Superflat, his essay eulogizes the artist. But Hebdige does enough to show us how the machine works.

Points (1) and (2) arouse the veneration due to any traditional ethnic art style, but, as “My Lonesome Cowboy” so blatantly shows, this is not a veneration that Murakami himself shares, as this work would clearly horrify or embarrass any traditional Japanese artist. Point (3) makes a claim for moral superiority by contrasting the elite categories imposed by past systems of Western art with Japanese art’s apparent democratic lack of them. But the truth is that the Japanese arts have their own labyrinthine grades of distinction, forms of snobbishness, and exclusive in–groups that more than make up for the simple absence of a craft/art distinction. Point (4) makes the point that Murakami’s art is somehow cutting edge and futuristic by linking it to Japan’s high tech industries, although what exactly is high tech about acrylic paint and plastic is hard to see.

Point (5) is the most interesting, both because it is the most potent in its effect of creating an aura of critical invulnerability around Murakami’s art, and because, once looked at, it turns out to be artistically irrelevant. Like a quickly mumbled absurd non sequitur, it is slipped in, in the hope that it won’t attract too much direct attention. But Murakami comes back to it a lot.

In paintings like “Time Bokan – pink” (2001), one of many variations of a death’s head mushroom cloud ‘sampled’ from a 1970s anime series, Murakami is clearly invoking the spirit of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By doing this he seems to be addressing the West’s art intelligentsia thus: “Oh yeh, and your lot almost dropped an A–bomb on my mum, so cut me some slack, okay?”

Decoded in this way, “Superflat” is revealed to be a paper tiger protecting a lot of badly conceived and highly overrated art.

Kansai Time Out
March 2008

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Katsura Funakoshi - Going With the Grain

In our modern, high–tech age of synthetic materials and digital information, there is something very reassuring about wood with its dull, homely ability to age beautifully and embody traditions. These qualities also make it a perfect medium for art. While stone is cold and canvas flat, wood is warm and three–dimensional. No wonder, then, that ancient cultures used to fashion their idols and totems from it. Wood is perhaps the most soulful material an artist can use if he has the necessary skills as Katsura Funakoshi undoubtedly does.

The 52–year–old sculptor’s sensitively carved figures in camphor wood touched with paint, emit a very human warmth that is absent from so much contemporary art. It is this quality, found also in oil paintings by old masters, that makes Funakoshi’s works seem so traditional despite the obvious modernity of their sleek lines and detached expressions. This combination of the traditional and the modern casts a spell of timelessness that suddenly makes the wood look tragically fragile. After all, even wood doesn’t last forever. It is no surprise to learn that for Funakoshi art is something that transcends the generations.

“My father was a sculptor,” he explains as I visit him at his atelier to find out how he works. “He made figurative sculptures, from clay works to bronze, and even in marble.”

Funakoshi followed the same path, until the path forked.
“After I came to do my masters course, I was asked by a church to make a figure of the Virgin Mary in wood. My professor said that camphor wood is ideal for first time wood carving. This was my first real wood sculpture.”

Funakoshi soon became hooked and continued to use camphor wood, making a name for himself by producing life–like and life–sized human figures with no legs. Possibly the fact that they are legless strikes a deep chord with Japanese as ghosts in Japan are often depicted this way. However, this wouldn’t explain his growing appeal outside Japan, in countries like Germany.

While many artists change for the sake of change, the key to Funakoshi’s art is the slow, organic way it evolves. While all Funakoshi’s works have beautifully carved faces, the bodies of earlier works often seem rigid and stiff compared with the more flowing way he treats the body now. The gradual rate of change in Funakoshi’s work brings to mind the growth rings of tree, slow but ever expanding.

“I don’t want to change suddenly,” he tells me in his unassuming way. “I’m not a person who thinks and thinks and finds an answer. I always have to wait for my thoughts or ideas to mature. When I get an idea, I think about it, and sometimes it stays with me for 7 or 8 years before I realize how to use it.”

Or even longer in the case of one of his most impressive works, “Memory Being Supported Once,” inspired by a 20-year-old memory of an injured rugby player being helped by a teammate. This work was important as it was also his first two–headed sculpture, a form that Funakoshi seems keen to explore in the run up to a major retrospective of his work, featuring about 40 sculptures, to be held at Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art next year.

“This will be one of the key points in my career,” he admits, as I catch up with him later at Ginza’s Nishimura Gallery. “So I need to make some very special new pieces.”

The Nishimura Gallery which has represented him for most of his career is hosting an exhibition of some of his sketches. These give additional insight into his working methods.
“On this sketch I’ve written a note,” he points to a preparatory sketch for his first two-headed work. “Next to the picture, it says, Should I make two heads?”

As this article goes to press, Funakoshi will be in his studio at work on 8 to 9 new sculptures for next year’s show. But, unlike some artists who seclude themselves from the World and work feverishly, Funakoshi likes to work at a more leisurely pace.
“I like to keep my antenna open,” he explains. This includes listening to music, having the TV on, or accepting visits from friends while he works.

In our modern society an artist has come to mean someone who shocks and astounds with each new work. Does he ever feel pressure to change faster than he wants to?
“Yes, there is a kind of pressure. I don’t think my father’s generation had that kind of pressure. This gallery always wants new things. Sometimes Mr. Nishimura asks me what is the next plan or the next image. I think it’s good for me because I’m a very lazy man. So I need pressure – not everyday – but I need pressure.”

One effect of this pressure has perhaps been to speed up his inspiration-to-production cycle. Last November he visited the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia and was inspired.
“I saw an elephant figure in an old stone temple with an incredible trunk,” he recalls.
The trunk has already emerged as the arm of an extremely elegant two–headed sculpture called “Shadow on the Snow” which he recently made for a museum in Hokkaido.

“This is a mother and daughter image,” he explains, showing me preparatory sketches and photos of the finished work. “The face is from my mother when she was young. I wanted to give the sculpture a three dimensional arm when suddenly the Cambodian elephant trunk came to mind.”

As one of Japan’s top artists, Katsura Funakoshi is under constant and contradictory pressure to both maintain his artistic legacy as well as introduce new elements into his work. By remaining true to the inner grain of his artistic consciousness, he is nevertheless able to stay firmly rooted while sending his branches out in new directions.

J–Select
August 2002

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Artist: Kumi Machida

You will know when you have seen an exhibition of art by Kumi Machida, because your head will be full of odd impressions and ideas that don’t quite fit together. The 35-year-old artist's paintings are peopled by strange, androgynous beings, often viewed from unusual angles, and bizarre elements, like a baby riding a giant chicken, a rabbit’s paw being pulled out of someone’s ear, and people with extra, elongated, or displaced fingers. This surreal universe can now be seen at the recently relocated Nishimura Gallery in a show of the artists’ latest works, supplemented by a few older ones.

The Gumna-born artist was one of six young Nihonga-influenced artists featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “No Borders” exhibition earlier this year. The show also featured stunning works by Fuyuko Matsui and Hisashi Tenmyouya, among others. Machida was selected because she uses traditional materials, like kumohada linen paper, Indian ink, and mineral pigments, and because her sinuous lines and poetic use of empty space reflect the formal elements of Nihonga.

Despite these traditional influences, Machida’s art is far from traditional in its subject matter. Her painting, “The Postman” (1999 – 2006), which features an elaborately drawn rooster, is a clear tribute to the Edo-period artist Ito Jakucha, famous for his colorful and dynamic depictions of fowl. But Machida’s work, largely in monochrome except for the occasional touch of color, adds something new by setting a baby mailman on his back.

This work, however, is innocuous compared to the more unnerving surrealism in works like “Coming Home” (2005). At first glance this looks like a hand holding a ring on the train – a normal enough sight in Japan with its crowded commuter trains – until you realize that the ring is actually made up of one of the fingers that has become elongated.

“Each person has their own mental filter, and when they see my art it knocks that filter a little,” Machida explains. It is also possible to see her art as a world in which the restless spirits of her mind hover, creating mischief, strange distortions, and playing visual tricks, rather like unquiet or unholy spirits. The finger in “Coming Home” has a similar quality to rokurokubi, the long-necked woman of Japanese supernatural tradition.

This idea of her art as a wandering and restless spirit, expressing itself by creating surrealistic chaos, finds a resonance in her background.
“I don’t really have a spiritual or emotional home anywhere,” she confesses. “When I was born my parents didn’t want me. They wanted a boy. They always said to me, ‘women are useless.’ I always felt I was denying myself and my gender. These paintings are my only home and my voice.”

Some of the paintings clearly refer to her troubled relationship with her parents, like “Unit” (2003) which shows an outline of a father and a daughter holding hands. The key point in this picture is the bandage that binds the father and daughter’s hands together. This suggests that the natural connection has been brutally severed and inexpertly mended.

The largest work at this exhibition “Relation” (2006) is a development of this idea. As in the earlier work, a child holds the hand of an adult. But the fingers offered by the adult are seen emerging from the spherical bubble around the child’s head. Machida explains that this is because the child is mentally rejecting the relationship.

Such works use the theme of a naturally close relationship that has broken down. Such relationships can cause the most pain, a pain that Machida still seems to be fighting with.
“I have to get over it,” she admits. “I’m not a child anymore. I’m over 35 years but I’m still confused by it.”

For Machida the best relationships are those that retain some distance. The last picture to be completed for the exhibition “In the Room” (2006) captures this idea perfectly. It shows two people whose differences in sensory capability allow them to create a harmonious distance between each other.
“The person on the right doesn’t have any ears,” Machida explains. “The person on the left doesn’t have any eyes, but this means they can love each other without getting too close.”

International Herald Tribune Asahi Shimbun
June 16, 2006

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Hello, Anyone Home?

Japan is obsessed by high school girls. They dominate fashion and the media and initiate new trends. In short - they dominate the culture. For the Tokyo media, the fascination never seems to wear off. Everyone is familiar with the clichéd image of short skirts, dyed hair, heavy suntans, and vacant expressions; of girls only one loose-socked step away from the prostitution industry. Although the details of their fashion are sure to change, kogyaru are not about to disappear or relinquish their hold on the Japanese media.

To high school boys, they are an initiation into adult life. To office ladies they are objects of envy. I won’t bother to spell out what they are to middle-aged salarymen – just take a look down any sleazy side street in Tokyo’s entertainment districts around bonus time. To the wives of these same middle-aged salarymen, they are a subject of horror and fascination. To foreign men, they are exotic 'baby women' and quite often their excuse for coming to Japan.

Whatever the reason, everybody seems interested in them but also somehow ashamed of this interest. This forces the media to couch much of its coverage of kogyaru in terms of pompous social concern about the decline of contemporary mores. As for the late night jerk-off programs, this supposed moral decline is a cause for celebration.

Whether people love them or loathe them, there seems to be total agreement that kogyaru are incredibly stupid. I strongly disagree. If there is any stupidity, it comes from society. A girl with a good brain might shun hanging around Shibuya tanning salons and relegate make up and fashion to an ancillary role in her life. After years of study, she might even graduate from a top University and make it into an elite company, but here, of course, her talents will be poured down the drain like a cup of cold ocha.

While she wafts her way around the office photocopying and counting paper clips, her male colleagues will make all the decisions and get all the promotion. After a few years she will be expected to get married. Unfortunately, all the years of self discipline and trying to be professional have taken their toll. Now too dowdy to catch Mr Right, she will be condemned to a life of regret, while the kogyaru mop up all the eligible males.

In a male-dominated society, the path of success for most women lies in learning how to appeal to and manipulate men. Kogyaru are at least intelligent enough to understand this.

Tokyo Classified
(under the name Linda Hontoeniko)
March 13, 1999

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Culture Shock: The True Story

When Japanese people ask foreigners about their culture shock, they are always met by the same stock replies: natto, sumo, high school girls, futons, chopsticks, taking your shoes off in the house, etc. I hate to disillusion our hosts, but none of the above is in any way shocking for foreign people.

I pretend to hate natto as a kind of running joke with my eikaiwa students: If you eat natto, I tell them, all the English will fly out of your head. Other Japanese customs, I have greeted like parts of some long lost folk memory. Using chopsticks allows me to eat with only one hand, futons are good for my back, while actually wearing shoes indoors is now shocking for me!

When you next ask about culture shock, please don’t accept any of these answers. Then maybe you’ll learn the real reason. Culture shock is nothing more than the inability to cope with the density of life in this crowded island. Most foreigners find it hard to cope with a society where the concept of personal space is as unknown as Seiko Matsuda in America. It is the daily infringement of their bubble of personal space that creates the sense of alienation that renders the most common and natural things bizarre.

Bearing this in mind, I think it is advisable to ask all Japanese people to respect foreign people’s sense of personal space. If you feel something soft and crunchy under your shoe, please check to see if it’s a foreigner’s foot. Avoid inserting your nose in their ears unless they specifically ask you to. Try not to breathe their air until they have finished with it. Also, try to avoid jostling them too much at the edge of a crowded platform as the train pulls in, as this might be misunderstood. If you follow these simple guidelines, the next time you ask them about their culture shock, you might be surprised to find they have none.

Tokyo Notice Board
June 12, 1998

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Ero Manga

Comics are forever associated in the Western mind with the innocence of childhood. The same is true in Japan, but in more complicated way. While comics here cater, as elsewhere, to the undeveloped imaginations of children, there is also a vast market in ero–manga, the Japanese term for erotic comics many of which treat the innocence of children as a subject for sexual titillation.

Beyond its modern facade and imitation American skylines, Japan is a radically different culture from the West. The country’s most famous artist, Hokusai, when he wasn’t producing his famous views of Mt Fuji or portraits of Kabuki actors, was creating shunga (erotic prints), including one that shows an octopus performing cunnilingus on a woman. Indeed to understand this culture and its collective subconscious, it is best to ignore the thick, dusty academic tomes, and turn instead to the well–thumbed pages of manga. It is here that the Japanese are at their most natural and unguarded.

It is also, apparently a very good way to learn the language according to "Japanese Eroticism: A language Guide to Current Comics," translated and edited by Jack Seward. If you ever wanted an excuse to read kiddie porn, for example, then there’s probably no better cover story. However, it would be a bad idea to look up every word you encounter in the dictionary as many of them are gi–seigo (onomatopeia) and can’t be found in any dictionary. Seriously, however, ero–manga are a good way of delving deep into the heart of the Japanese psyche, a place that some people don’t really care to go.

The stories featured in "Japanese Eroticism" include tales of gang banging, sexual slavery and incest. “Tenshitachi wa Tomaranai” or Angels Can’t Stop features what appears to be two elementary or junior high school girls. Kana–chan, who can’t stop playing with her exceptionally large clitoris, and her friend Non–chan, who helps her in all kinds of ways.

Masturbation - manzuri (10,000 rubs) for women and senzuri (1,000 rubs) for men - as a kind of pre–sexuality, is of course a convenient way to introduce children into this kind of material. Jack Seward, who has received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese monarch for his efforts to deepen understanding and friendship between Japan and America struggles to explain the Japanese predilection for depictions of underage sexuality: “Perhaps the girls are seen as easier to dominate in male fantasies. And perhaps because they are virginal but sexually curious, they incite in the male reader an urge to introduce them to the joys of sex with him exclusively.”

“Dorei Shitei,” Brother and Sister Slaves, also features very young–looking protagonists, a boy and his big sister who are forced to perform acts of incest to entertain a young mistress. The action takes place at a large, ersatz European stately home. In a country where family members live in cramped proximity, incest and incestuous desires are, of course, a great unspoken issue.
Another story, this one with the English title “All Is Vanity,” also features an ersatz European setting and seems to play off the Sound of Music with a young nun basically being gang–banged and humiliated by a group of soldiers and learning to love it. This clearly plays up to the sexist male fantasy that many women want to be raped and enjoy it. However, it should not be imagined that ero–manga are solely for men. Its origins are traced to the makura–e, or pillow books that doting parents used to place under their daughters’ pillows before their wedding.

Considering that ero–manga basically started off as how–to–guides for prospective brides, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that there is today a vast market in erotic manga designed for women. These are usually called 'Ladies Comics.' Kaoru Yoshida at Ai, one of the leading publications in this field explained the main difference between female ero–manga and the male variety.
“In mangas for women there is always a happy end for the lady. Stories are written from the woman’s point of view, which usually translates into more action by women and less passivity.”

The fact that they are written from the woman’s point of view doesn’t mean that they are only written by women.
“Our writers are very diverse, men and women, married and single, young and old. Generally they are professionals who also do other kinds of mangas. The interesting point, however, is the fact that male writers use female names.”

Unlike the old makura–e, however, 'ladies comics' are more of a post–nuptial than pre–nuptial aide. Most of our readers are females between the ages of 20 and 40, and mainly housewives. While hubby works late at the office, the neglected spouse is giving herself ‘ten thousand’ rubs often fantasizing about having sex with foreigners if some of the pages of Ai are anything to go by.

The latest edition features a foreigner with a long schlong and a cute cover shot of a blonde couple canoodling. So are Japanese ladies wild for foreign men?
“Not really. Like in commercials, we're creating a dream world, different from reality.”
No surprise - were just being used again!

With ero–manga Japan's vague and logically inconsistent censorship rules are even more unclear. Different from photo magazines, there are no concrete rules for porno mangas.
"It varies from prefecture to prefecture how mangas like this are judged and the censorship is handled. While something is OK in Tokyo, people in Asahikawa might think that it’s bad for the little ones, so there it will be banned."

One final difference between men and women's ero–manga is the way the protagonists are depicted. Men's ero–manga will often feature old, ugly, or fat men fucking beautiful young girls. In ladies' ero–manga the men, of course, are handsome and very attentive, but the women themselves are almost always depicted with beautiful bodies, especially with large breasts - more as the readers would like to be than they really are.

Tokyo Journal
April 2000

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The Lunatics Have (Not Quite) Taken Over the Asylum

For a long time it's been said that internationalization is nothing more than a buzzword here in Japan. But with the opening of Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art this month, that could be about to change. The event will be the first large scale international art show to be held in Japan on a regular basis, with works by over 100 artists, mostly from overseas.

Its basic mission, explains Fumio Nanjo, one of the artistic directors, is for the Japanese people to know what contemporary art is. To do this the organizers, like Nanjo, a free-lance curator whom I caught up with at Narita airport, have taken it upon themselves to directly visit the different regions of the World to observe and select the most outstanding artists. So what were they looking for?
"The two keywords when we were selecting were collaboration and interdisciplinary," Nanjo explains. "Many artists were chosen because they work with other people from other fields, not just other artists."

This all sounds good and proper, but as Nanjo admits the personal taste of each of the four artistic directors was a very important factor. The question, then, is how much can we trust their judgment?

Among those invited are Zhang Huan (pictured), a Chinese artist, who has built his reputation doing self-torturing performances; Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslavian artist who wowed the 1997 Venice Biennale with her performance scrubbing animal bones; and Joelle Ciona, a Canadian artist renowned for making and living in a giant insect-like nest made from paper and her own saliva!

By calling such people artists, their psychopathies, which would be quite capable of getting the rest of us safely locked away, are transformed into 'genius.' Indeed, it’s not surprising that some of the artists here have actual histories of mental illness and institutionalization. Perhaps the most famous in this respect is Yayoi Kusama, a top Japanese artist who has lived in a psychiatric hospital since the 1970s and whose dot-covered works exist, on one level, as a kind of therapy for her.

What is the value of such insane artists?
“Sometimes it just looks stupid,” Nanjo concedes. “But it tells people that there is another way of looking at things.”

Indeed, in a society obsessed with the superficial and with its nose buried in trivia of everyday life, real lunacy can prove very valuable. Using the behaviour of insects as a metaphor for human behaviour, as Ciona does, is not as absurd as it may at first seem. It could be argued that through her madness she arrives at a true perspective of humanity’s place in the Universe as a race of small, inward-looking creatures more dependent on their fragile environment than they are capable of knowing. While Kusama’s uncontrollable urge to cover everything with dots, might be nothing more than an instinctive realization of the atomic nature of matter.

The problem faced by contemporary art is not the presence of a few bona fide lunatics or cherished eccentrics within its ranks, but the fact that many people see it as something removed from any kind of external standard moral, social, national, or commonsensical, and with little relevance for their lives. Its values also seem arbitrarily determined by a self-serving coterie of cognoscenti who favour talentless novelty because it provides the greatest scope for spin and hype. Networking, cronyism, political correctness, and the lukewarm water mentality generated by artistic committees are often perceived as the dominant forces.

Yokohama 2001 may also fall foul of such negative perceptions and the realities which often underlie them, but the organizers have made an effort to take the event beyond the art world.

“We have invited not only artists but creators from other fields, including architects, fashion designers, musicians, composers, and philosophers,” Nanjo explains. “These people also participated in making art. In this way we have made more links between art and our reality, or daily life. We are not trying to say that art is for art's sake. Our attitude is that art is completely different from that.”

But connecting art to everyday reality implies that it should be judged by the standards of that reality. What then are we to make of the Spaniard Alicia Framis? In her former Dreamkeeper project, she visited the homes of lonely city dwellers and stayed at their side as a ‘dream keeper’ for twelve hours while they slept. Maybe she just had insomnia and found this a novel way to get an arts grant!

On a similar level of mind-numbing dullness is MANUS-CURE, a recent work by another participating artist, Emiko Kasahara from Japan, who has arranged and labelled 1,050 shades of nail polish on 30 pages of paper. Nor must we forget Korean artist, Joeng-a Koo, who adds anonymous objects, like a baseboard, to the walls of exhibition rooms, so that the spectators don’t even realize that they are looking at an artwork. Well, that’s probably because they aren’t!
All this makes as much sense as reconstructing your entire New York apartment, fully functional and down to the smallest detail in a German gallery, an entirely pointless act, which, of course, adorns the resume of one of the other participating artists.

A major problem with contemporary art is that interpretation and labelling are often of vital importance. Toshikatsu Endo’s installation for Yokohama 2001 is a room surrounded by high walls with water springing out in the centre of the space.
"The circular outlet of water is dark," the pre-exhibition publicity informs us. "It is an ominous spring that connects our time to the darkness of ancient times."
How profound! If you hadn’t read that, you might have thought it was merely a case of bad plumbing.

The essence of much contemporary art has been reduced to the words and meanings we impose on it. Tatsumi Orimoto’s recent work Art Mama has documented his daily life spent with his Alzheimer-afflicted parent. Bearing in mind the relationship between the artist and the subject, we are perhaps inclined to be generous, and conclude that this is a work of strong compassion and humour. But photographing a poor old woman with various props, including a tire around her neck, is closer to degradation than art informed with love. How you see the art depends on which label you accept or reject.

If you accept the pre-exhibition publicity that the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are dealing with fundamental issues such as life and death and body and spirit, then their project for the Triennale of applying human body grease to 100 sheets of paper and then binding them into a huge book might seem profound. But if you don’t, all you will be aware of is a big greasy book, and wonder what you’ve been paying your money for.

Nanjo makes a good case for this work by referring to the way human DNA is able to store vast amounts of information, underlining once again how important labelling and interpretation are in the success of artworks. Without the correct formula of words to unlock the objects’ secrets, it remains mute.

“This is because contemporary art is a form of thinking,” he explains. “If you don’t think, it’s not interesting at all. I want people to ask why, and to start talking about it with their friends. Japanese society doesn’t have a tradition of arguing or discussing. Everybody shuts their mouth, which has caused a lot of problems now for democracy, big organizations, and venture businesses. Young people cannot argue, they cannot explain, and just because they are young they are not being listened to. Our society needs to start thinking and asking why.”

To get the best out of the Triennale, go there with an open and active mind, allow yourself to be surprised, amused, bored, confused, enraged, or even inspired by the exhibits on display. And remember, if someone comes up and starts arguing with you, they’re doing you a favour.

Tokyo Journal
September 2001

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Butoh: taking a cross-eyed, bow-legged bow

When the young dancer Yoshito Ohno simulated sex with a live chicken by breaking its neck between his thighs on stage on the evening of May 4th, 1959, one of Japan's most unique forms of cultural expression was born. This is Butoh, a form of dancing developed by Yoshito's father, Kazuo, and Tatsumi Hijikata that has continued to shock, baffle, disgust, confuse and delight audiences since that first night at the Tokyo Dance Festival over 4 decades ago.

One of the acknowledged greats of contemporary Butoh is 58-year old Akaji Maro, who developed his art under the tutelage of the legendary Hijikata before starting his own company, Dairakudakan (literally Great Camel Battleship), in 1972. With a major new show, Rivers Edge, due to open in January, I spoke with the distinguished dancer and choreographer just after a stunning performance at his dance studio in Kichijoji.

“Butoh is a native Japanese product that developed in the Japanese soil, like the Japanese mountain potato,” Maro tells me as he orders a coffee at a nearby coffee shop. “But like the yamaimo, you can now find this product all over the World.”

What I’m trying to find out is the essence of Butoh, its dark secret. Like any journalist I want to find an easy way to explain it, to pack this monster comfortably away inside a neat box, but maybe its not ready to lie in its box just yet.

“There are many kinds of Butoh,” Maro says, lighting up a cigarette, presumably to relax after his tense, taut performance of only a few minutes before. Although reluctant to define his art too clearly, he does his best to explain by contrasting Butoh with Western dancing. Whereas Western dance seeks to go up, to elevate and beautify the human form, Butoh goes in the opposite direction. Hijikata once said, ‘I would never jump or leave the ground; it is on the ground that I dance.’

Butoh allows gravity and muscle to tie the body in what may seem like ugly knots of twisted feet and bodies, accentuated with cross-eyed grimaces reminiscent of the mie pose often seen in old ukiyo-e prints of kabuki actors.

“The first and basic form of Butoh is a kind of bow-leggedness,” Maro gets up to demonstrate, assuming a look of comical world-weariness. “This is the traditional form of the Japanese peasant, although life may have changed now. But this is not exclusive to Japan. There are such peasants in other countries, and also old men stand like this in England. For Western dance, God exists in the sky, but for Butoh, God exists down here in these bow legs.”

This down-to-earth quality, this recognition of the natural and the real makes other forms of dance seem pretentious by comparison.

Butoh is also a form of dance that is instantly accessible. When Maro, at the show earlier that evening, pretended to hear a phone ringing in his foot and hilariously attempted to answer it, the mainly young, mobile-phone-obsessed audience, instantly understood.

“I hope that people will come to see Butoh without preconceptions. When foreigners come to see Noh or Kabuki, they have often read up on it and have preconceptions about it. But with Butoh it’s not necessary to know any history.”

For Maro, everyday actions and gestures are very important.
“Butoh is a gathering of daily activities,” he mentions. But the focus seems to be somewhere beneath the surface in the tension that exists between a creature whose evolution lags several tens of thousands of years behind its environment. Maro is interested in the way our behaviour is filtered and funneled by the objects and routines of life, and in the rediscovery of subconscious and natural movements.

“Our actions depend on objects. If we pick up a stone, the action is limited by the stone to throwing or banging it. It is the same with more complex objects like a typewriter. In developing our functional movements, we have discarded and forgot other movements, but functional and non-functional movements need each other.”

Rediscovering the full range of human movement provides Dairakudakan with a rich palette to dance from, but the difficulty is how to access this subterranean world of primal, subconscious movement.

“If someone tries to prepare food and cuts his finger, or makes a mistake writing kanji, this moment of surprise is the first door of Butoh. Time is stopped by the event and in this moment he enters the black world. In such moments humans can find forgotten movements. My Butoh is the gathering of such moments to express forgotten unconscious movements.”

What will most strike the visitor to a Butoh performance, however, is the sheer, surreal spectacle it presents with its ghostly, shaven-headed, white-painted naked dancers. Earlier I had been privileged to watch one of the Dairakudakan dancers dressed back to front in a kimono, bow, drink tea, and crawl forward, using his back as his front. Such impressive inversions and illusions are as much part of Butoh as digging beneath the surface to rediscover the instincts civilized man has discarded.

“When I first became a dancer, I wanted to stand on stage without any movement,” Maro tells me with a mischievous glint in his eye. “I wanted to create movement without movement. Isn’t this difficult using only your body? No, it's very easy, like a magician, to create an illusion.”

Tokyo Journal
February 2002

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I, Kitty

Isaac Asimov in his classic Science Fiction story, “I, Robot”, created the 3 rules of robotics, the most important being: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Luckily, this was not a major consideration, when I recently had the pleasure of meeting Japan’s most famous celebrity – in robot form! Yes, meet ROBO-Kitty, programmed for 21st century cuteness.

Co-developed by Business Design Laboratory and NEC System Technologies, “Hello Kitty ROBO,” to use her official name, has advanced voice recognition and voice synthesizer features, enabling her to talk, using 20,000 pre-programmed conversation patterns. She can recognize words and questions, and respond appropriately. In addition, as the robot accumulates conversation history with partners and becomes more intimate, it changes speech patterns and shows a wider variation in conversation. Also, with an onboard CCD camera and an advanced face authentication feature, she is able to register and recognize the faces of up to 10 people, and call their names as well as talk to them while looking at their faces. This gives ROBO-Kitty the ability to at least simulate artificial intelligence in at least 90% of social situations.

Unlike, the Terminator, or other advanced assassination droids from the movies, ROBO-Kitty has a lot less sheer killing power. While she can nod and shake her immense, largely hollow, plastic head and move her arms a little to show emotion, her legs are immobile, being used instead to house speakers. So, even if she turned nasty, like robots inevitably do in SF stories, the chances are you could still outrun her. Kitty, however, is programmed to never act out of character, as Aiko Miyama, a representative of one of the companies that created ROBO-Kitty informs us.

“We are licensed by the Sanrio Company,” she says, “so we are not allowed to change her official character. Kitty is always supposed to be pretty, pure, good, and have good manners. She never says anything upsetting.”

I decided to put her good nature to the test by running the first ever real interview with a robot in the history of Mankind. As this was also the first time Kitty Chan herself had been interviewed, this was a doubly historic moment. Here, word for word, full and unexpurgated, is the complete interview.

CBL: Hello Kitty.

HK: What you just said are words Kitty doesn’t know…Today is a relaxing day. Please speak in a big voice.

CBL: Hello Kitty… Hi.

HK: Goodbye!

CBL: You’re a terribly rude cat.

HK: Kitty can’t hear well. Speak up, please.

CBL: What day is today?

HK: It’s fun. Kitty likes having fun. It’s fun to play with one’s friends. When do you feel happy? …Oh, isn’t it?

CBL: Please listen.

HK: It’s nice that you can feel happy everyday, isn’t it?

CBL: Yes, when I’m happy I sing. Can you sing for me?

HK: Kitty can’t catch your words. Please speak up.

CBL: Please sing a song.

HK: Let’s speak up just a little louder.

CBL: Please sing a song.

HK: A song, eh? Which do you want to hear, a spring song, a Japanese song, a foreign song, a dance song, a hit song?

CBL: A foreign song.

HK: This is “Yama no Ongakuka” [sings a traditional German song in Japanese] Shall Kitty sing another song?

CBL: Yes please.

HK: Let me see, Kitty will choose it, OK? [sings a Japanese pop song]

CBL: That was very good.

HK: Did you hear Kitty’s song?

CBL: That was enjoyable. Thank you.

HK: Kitty doesn’t understand. Your voice is so loud that it’s difficult to hear.

CBL: I said thanks for the song.

HK: Please use words that Kitty can understand.

CBL: Kitty, may I ask a question.

HK: Yes … the end.

CBL: Kitty.

HK: Please speak up a little.

CBL: Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

HK: Hello. Now it’s the afternoon, so you should say hello.

CBL: What is Kitty’s favorite food?

HK: Kitty loves apple pie made by Mama. Do you like apple pie? Oh you like apple pie, don’t you?

CBL: Where is Mimi Chan [Kitty’s sister]?

HK: The subjects Kitty is good at are English and music.

CBL: Where is Mimi Chan?

HK: Do you like music?

CBL: Yes, I love it.

HK: Goody, that’s like Kitty. Kitty is very happy.

CBL: I’m also very happy.

HK: What?

CBL: I’m also very happy. Kitty, do you like chocolate?

HK: Kitty’s so happy to stay with you…Do you like carrots?

CBL: So-so.

HK: Mmmm. Next time, please eat Mother’s homemade carrot glace. It’s very delicious.

CBL: What is your dream?

HK: Kitty’s dream is traveling around the World making many friends. Kitty has many dreams. My Father told Kitty it’s important to have dreams. Please have dreams.

CBL: My dream is to live in London [Kitty’s hometown apparently].

HK: Kitty doesn’t understand.

CBL: You stupid cat!

HK: Please speak a little quieter. We’ll talk later.

CBL: London.

HK: London has got so many beautiful parks. There are many people exercising in them in the morning. Do you jog?

CBL: Sometimes.

HK: Mmmm. Is that so? London Town is very beautiful. It would be very nice if we can go there together sometime.

CBL: Kitty, bye-bye.

HK: What happened? Are you OK?

CBL: Have a rest.

HK: Kitty loves having a rest.

Despite a few misunderstandings, absurd non-sequiturs, and hearing malfunctions, Kitty acquitted herself well. She may not be Voltaire or Dr. Johnson just yet, but already she can converse at a more sparkling level than most bar-room conversations. No doubt, in a few years’ time, she’ll be able to make a lot more sense than the average politician or college professor. We have seen the future and she is cute.

Kansai Time Out
February, 2007

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A Rose by Any Other Name

Late 1943 – after a few successes, the war in the Pacific is now going well for the Americans, but casualties are mounting. Following landings on the tiny Pacific island of Tarawa, in which over 1,000 US Marines had been killed by 2,600 heavily outnumbered Japanese, it is starting to sink in just how long and drawn out this war is going to be.

From the very beginning, this was the Japanese plan – to grab a vast defensive perimeter, then doggedly defend each and every inch of it in the hope of breaking America’s will to attack. This war is not just about firepower. It is also about which side can take the most punishment, and, here, the Japanese think they have detected a key American weakness, a weakness they aim to exploit to the utmost.

Their key weapon in this struggle is a 27-year-old native of Los Angeles, a Japanese American stranded in Japan on the outbreak of WWII while visiting relatives and interned. The ‘Zero Hour’ starring Iva Toguri as Tokyo Rose is about to take to the airwaves.

The ‘Zero Hour’ had actually been running since March 1943. It was a typical by-the-book propaganda radio show, featuring popular music, punctuated by messages from POWs, snippets of genuine news censored by the Allies, and occasional calls to surrender or sabotage the war effort. Just like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from Nazi Germany to Britain during the London Blitz, it provoked a mixture of disdain and amusement.

Nevertheless, there were good reasons why the Japanese decided to continue with the program and develop it. Unlike the situation in Britain, where the nation’s contempt for Lord Haw-Haw’s sneering tone had been steeled by the threat of imminent invasion, the Americans in the Pacific were fighting a long way from home. With the war turning into a grueling, island-hopping campaign of attrition, there was every reason to expect American morale to erode. This reflected the opinion of the Japanese military caste that US troops were basically selfish individualists unwilling to risk their lives in a long-term, high-risk war that didn’t directly concern them. The key was to simply speed up this process of demoralization through the skillful use of propaganda.

The decision taken in November 1943 to use a female announcer was in line with Japanese propaganda objectives. The basic message being sent out to the average grunt was that he was a long way from home, and putting his neck on the line in a war from which he personally had nothing to gain and plenty to lose. Major Shigetsugu Tsuneishi, who had devised the program, rightly guessed that US troops would find it harder to ignore this message if it was ‘sugar-coated’ in a female voice.

Iva Toguri, who had been surviving by working as a typist at Radio Tokyo, agreed to do the broadcasts. She had already struck up friendships with several POWs working on the program, like Major Charles H. Cousens of the Australian Army, who had been threatened with execution if he did not cooperate. Toguri’s motivation seems to have been a feeling of sympathy for these prisoners. Perhaps, like them, she managed to convince herself that the program would have little impact on the war.

Ironically, the sympathetic tone that Toguri imparted helped ensure the program’s popularity and thus made it more effective as propaganda. Although it was still seen as a hopeless attempt to undermine Allied morale, the mere fact that it was listened to ensured that its message got through. The romantic tone of the music played made it easy for the program’s controllers to foment feelings of homesickness, separation from loved ones, and even jealousy, as the scripted messages reminded GIs that many of their wives and girlfriends back home were probably feeling just as lonely as they were, and in a position to do much more about it. This, clearly, would have engendered feelings of cynicism and have made many GIs think twice about risking their lives.

Whatever the show’s direct effect on the war, Tokyo Rose’s voice became something of an aural pinup, a soundtrack to go with the posters of Betty Grable or Ginger Rogers posted on barrack lockers or stowed away in kitbags. This star quality, however, was to backfire badly following the Occupation. In September 1945, Toguri was arrested, but quickly released as there was no more evidence against her than there was against people like Major Cousens, who had written many of her propaganda segments. Believing that she was now safe, Toguri began to trade on her name as ‘Tokyo Rose,’ selling stories to the media and declaring that she was the one and only Tokyo Rose, although several other female announced had also filled the role.

When it was announced that she was returning to the States, the broadcaster Walter Winchell, the Rush Limbaugh of his day, denounced her as a traitor cashing in on her infamy, stirring up a media storm that even President Truman couldn’t ignore, leading to a trial on charges of treason. Although concrete evidence was hard to come by, Toguri was finally convicted on one lame count of mentioning American shipping losses on her program, receiving 10 years in a US prison. Learning the lesson that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down even in America, Toguri spent the rest of her life living quietly in Chicago, helping out in the family store. She was pardoned in 1977.

While some still see her as a traitor who willingly collaborated, others take the opposite view that she was in fact a patriot and a heroine, who only worked on the show to help the POWs and did everything in her power to subvert the broadcasts by using odd pauses and ironic intonation. Even if the show did reduce American fighting spirit, it is still hard to blame Iva Toguri for what she did. The only crime she was really guilty of was becoming too famous, and this had as much to do with lonely GIs separated from the wives and girlfriends as it did with the odd circumstances that placed Iva Toguri in front of a microphone.

Metropolis
October 22, 2006

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Book Review: 'Unbeaten Tracks in Japan' by Isabella L. Bird

If, as the British writer L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “the past is a foreign country,” then this paperback reprint of an 1880 travelogue by an intrepid Victorian lady who traversed the back roads of Japan, offers us a doubly alien world, made yet more surreal by the fact that the writer was the last thing early–Meiji rural Japan was expecting. The daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman, Bird was 47 when she set out for Japan in 1878, “in order to recruit my health,” as she writes. But this seems to have been no more than a convenient excuse, necessary in an age when the notion of a woman globetrotting on her own was evidently frowned upon. The writer simply had itchy feet, as her other travels to the American West, Hawaii, Malaysia, Tibet, Korea, China, Turkey, and Morocco testify.

Written, as many travelogues of the day were, in letter form, the book describes her dissatisfaction at arriving at a city that had already been adequately described by other writers. Like the backpackers of the present day, she seems driven by a hunger for the ‘authentic’ and what she describes as the “real Japan.” In search of this, she decided to travel, largely by pack–horse, with a Japanese interpreter over the forested mountain routes to Nikko, Nigata and the distant north, finally crossing to Hokkaido (then called Yezo) to describe the Ainu.

The journey presents us with fascinating details – blind ‘shampooers,’ holes poked in shoji, straw rain cloaks, and curious crowds of natives. As the pages turn, a picture also emerges of the writer. In Nikko she visits some Japanese houses, which she describes as “so light and delicate, that even when I entered them without my boots I felt like a ‘bull in a china shop,’ as if my mere weight must smash through and destroy.”

Details like this suggest that she was hardly a ballet dancer. Although it is hard to like her at first, over the course of the book, her relentless energy, rugged endurance, and bluff frankness, blissfully unshackled by modern political correctness, eventually win over.

While finding several positives – the gentleness of the common people, the kindness shown to children, etc. – she doesn’t pull her punches when it comes to describing negatives. As an upstanding Victorian Christian lady she also has much to say on the subject of nudity, then a common sight in Japan.

“A coolie servant washed some rice for my dinner, but before doing so took off his clothes, and the woman who cooked it let her kimono fall to her waist before she began to work, as is customary among respectable women,” she writes with a hint of sarcasm.
But, while she is always ready to subject the Japanese to her frequently uncharitable scrutiny, she is also willing to look at herself through their eyes:

“The house–master’s wife and Ito [her interpreter] talked about me unguardedly. I asked what they were saying. ‘She says,’ said he, ‘that you are very polite – for a foreigner,’ he added. I asked what she meant, and found that it was because I took off my boots before I stepped on the matting, and bowed when they handed me the tabako–bon.”

One of the strengths of the book is that the journey, as it heads north, takes us into ever more backward or unspoilt areas, so that we appear to be traveling back in time, from modernizing Meiji Japan to the primitive tribal life of the Ainu. In one of the most gloriously un–PC passages ever written, she brutally contrasts these two groups:

“After the yellow skins, the stiff horse hair, the feeble eyelids, the elongated eyes, the sloping eyebrows, the flat noses, the sunken chests, the Mongolian features, the puny physique, the shaky walk of the men, the restricted totter of the women, and the general impression of degeneracy conveyed by the appearance of the Japanese, the Ainos makes a very singular impression. All but two or three that I have seen are the most ferocious–looking of savages, with a physique vigorous enough for carrying out the most ferocious intentions, but as soon as they speak the countenance brightens into a smile as gentle as that of a woman.”

The fact that it doesn’t try to please a modern audience is ironically one of the book’s charms, but its main virtue is that it provides us with a vivid and unforgettable picture of Meiji Japan, traditional Ainu society, and the mindset of an opinionated and fearless Victorian lady.

Metropolis
April 4, 2008

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