Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Onsen, Japan's quiet treasure.
The Onsen, volcanic hot spring spa, is a pleasure of which I can never tire. If you need to remember who you are and what your life is really about then the onsen is one of the places where you can take a weary soul. However it is important for me that the journey is to a Ryokan, a traditional Japanese hotel, rather than something which panders towards the needs of the outsider, the tourist hoard.
Our favourite ryokan is near Nagano, not far from the ski resort Shiga Kogen. What makes this place special, and we have been here at least once every year for the last six years, is that it has a balance between all the elements of Japanese hostelry in which tradition is maintained alongside a gentle innovation that makes this ryokan very accessible for the non-Japanese traveller. The main innovation is in the food, always a problematic area for those unfamiliar with the cuisine. Here the chef combines the traditional Japanese with the skills he learnt training in Italy. In a subtle blend the menu delights the senses with a masterful display of the art of presentation and flavour.
Sleeping in the Japanese style of futons on tatami mat floor may not appeal to some travellers so best they go somewhere else; Disneyland perhaps! For us it is an absolute delight and having taken to this kind of sleeping arrangement we fail to understand the attraction of sleeping in "beds" which feel akin to trying to rest in a rowing boat. The tatami mat floor provides a firm yet springy base, the futon a shallow draught mattress and the comfort and quality of sleep is unimpeachable. True, it may take a little getting used to and if you are one of life's moaners, someone who can find a problem where others see a delight, then again, go and get your photo taken with Mickey Mouse.
The room is spacious and separated into three areas. There is a toilet, sink and refrigerator in a separate space and a small private tub into which the hot volcanic spring water flows. At one end the sliding doors lead out into a pristine Japanese zen garden, at the other end there is a wooden verandah which overlooks the forest and mountainside.
On returning from your evening meal you will find your futons all laid out in your room. Perhaps a cigarette is to be enjoyed with Honourable Uncle (HU), maybe a glass of beer on the verandah, but after an hour or so it is time then to go down to the onsen baths and just luxuriate in hot water.
A view back into the room from the verandah with the forest reflecting on the glass. Every room in the Ryokan has a similar layout and the facilities within each are identical. There is only one standard and that is "superb". Each room is positioned to provide a view of the local natural beauty.
Everywhere there are examples of a fine art of decoration and even my own presence is unable to detract from the beauty of the place.
Your meals are in your own private dining room. As you can see in the image below these are found down a long corridor. To the left of HU you can see sliding doors and behind these is a dining room.
Our dining room is right at the end of the hallway but has the benefit of a view out into the garden and world beyond. This is where we eat our evening meal and the morning's breakfast.
The meals are served at the table by the ladies in pristine kimonos. Manners are impeccable and the traditional rituals of serving food are observed. The dishes keep coming and it seems more like a banquet than a "hotel supper".
This is my favourite ryokan and in all our years here and travels around others we have yet to find one which can compete on quality, service, ambience, facility and price. The image below gives you an available "cheap hotel" in London for a price way above the cost of staying at this ryokan (meals included). Actually I find it not just embarrassing but humiliating to even think of the way we rape the wallets of travellers to London without a shred of quality or hint of customer service and value. Our consumer society is a shameful exploitation of common humanity by the soulless bean counters which are the parasites of the world. This is not to say that Japan is devoid of consumer exploitation or bean counters but within their society there remains a sense of duty in providing service and places of quality and value are much easier to find than in the consumer slaughterhouse which is the UK.
Friday, 6 July 2012
Grandmother's Grave
A quick visit to the hospital produced results that made Purple High Mountain smile. Apparently I am physically fit with regards to my gall bladder. I am sure that, like me, everyone has heard of the gall bladder but has not clue number one what it actually does. I am not even sure the doctors know what it does as they advise that it can be removed without any particular ongoing problem. One wonders why it is there in the first place. Just so it can be removed doesn't seem like much of a reason.
Anyway, as tasteless as it might seem to have a gall bladder bouncing around over these pages like some sort of medical football (sorry about this imagery) the reason for me bringing this subject up is the usual dig at British doctors. You see my Ox Hammer insists on regular medical check ups for me when we are in Japan. The particular doctor we went to see this time had noticed a "thickening of the wall of the gall bladder" last January and decided it was worth monitoring the situation.
This contrasts starkly with my last GP who started shouting like a 9 year old when I told him that I had regular medicals in Japan. "This is all rubbish, complete rubbish, it does no-one any good and just creates anxieties that are unnecessary." he snapped anxiously. I calmly responded, "Well you are dealing with a different culture of medicine here and it is my wife's culture. In Japan they believe in preventative medicine, catching things before they become a major problem rather than dealing with major problems." That was when his anxiety levels hit the roof and he really started shouting at me. "This is all unnecessary, it's a complete waste of time......" I didn't hear anything else he said because I had got up and walked out. Typical arrogant British GP who treats patients like production line mushrooms.
What I love about the Japanese hospitals is the efficiencies. Obviously the scrupulous hygiene is attractive but the efficiencies are exquisite to the British eye. Apologies for the quality of the photo above however you will appreciate the technical difficulties I face as a cultural reporter photographing inside a hospital with a security guard standing by my shoulder. I can hardly ask him if he could hold a tripod whilst I check my settings. So the sneaky snap school of photography is the way forward.
The image above shows the accounts department. This is at the main entrance/exit and as you can see is well staffed (count the heads). There are about nine people behind that counter at most times and if you queue for more than a minute you are very unlucky. After leaving your appointment you go to this desk and present your hospital card. From that they can instantly read off your treatment and its costs. They then process that, provide you with a payment number and send you to the other side of the lobby where the payment machines are.
There are eight of these ATM style machines and when your number comes up on the big board (about a two minute wait) you progress to the machine, insert your hospital card and then pay in cash or by credit card. The money for your treatment is in the hospital bank account before you leave. As previously reported, in Japan everyone pays 30% of their medical costs but I, as a foreigner, get to pay 100%.
So we coughed up the required £5 for my consultation with the doctor that day. Obviously the tests I had gone through the previous week had been paid on that visit but even so those amounted to £48. So a total of £53 to make sure one part of my body is not a cause for concern. Perhaps that GP should consider popping over to Japan for an anxiety test!
With the Ox Hammer in tip top form now she knows her husband will live for another year she is up for buying me a beer. Wisely, I suggest that we should first visit Grandmother's grave. I didn't realise exactly how good a move that was until much later.
On our way we stopped to buy some postcards and I was particularly taken by the subject matter of some of them. Note the minimalist approach of the one second from the right. I bought that as a collectors item and no doubt will proudly show it off when back in the UK. "Have you seen my Japanese postcard collection? I only have one but it is a corker!"
The graveyards in Japan are tended by a temple within which sits a monk/monks who are always there to provide the best quality customer service. Remember that in the Japanese religious traditions the dead are a continuous source of income for many years after they transit over into the spiritual plane. Their journey to re-incarnation is fraught with dangers and so a rigid pattern of rituals needs to be performed at pre-determined intervals in the calender in order to ease that journey. Obviously, the more you pay for the rituals the higher status monk you get to perform a better level of ritual. You, or in this case your ancestor, only gets what you pay for.
After all, maintaining a graveyard and ensuring that the monks and their temple are all running smoothly requires more than just prayers. In Buddhism the material world is not all there is, all about us are the spiritual planes of existence and it is the task of the monks to interact and intercede with those ethereal realities. Life is an illusion and through self discipline and prayer the monks show the way towards nirvana and the path through which a soul can become a fully self realised being at one with Buddha.
The site of grandmother's grave (HMiL's honourable mother) is in the north of Tokyo. This is an urban landscape is filled with graveyards and temples, it is a city of the dead where the living abide right up to its edge. Each graveyard immaculately tended to, each temple guarded by gardens of flowers.
Grandmothers grave is a place we go to every time we are in Tokyo. Paying respect to the ancestors is a very important part of Japanese culture for all you have and are today relies on their smiling down on you. Each day we tend to the two shrines in the home, each visit to Japan we go to grandmother's grave and also to father's grave. Father is a duty and lies two hours outside of Tokyo in the home village, grandmother is a devotion, Ox Hammer loved, and still loves, her grandmother and spent a lot of her childhood with her.
We were fortunate to see a lotus flower, the season was not right but luck was with us. This was the first time I had seen one in bloom.
The temples and their gardens are in many ways the anchor of tradition in Japanese culture. This bedrock is a cultural artefact we have lost in the UK. Our churches have become culturally decentralised.
If you compare the fundamentalist baptist churches of London with the temples of Japan, the lack of value for money is apparent. In Japan the monks and the temples are an ever present cultural resource which provide a continuity of what it is to be Japanese. In London, Baptist ministers buy villas in Florida on the "church" credit card whilst operating their business out of a disused warehouse or cinema without any gardens whatsoever.
Japanese religions, as you would expect, are a much more efficient business model that believe in customer service and consumer value as an intrinsic part of the proposition. When we arrive at grandmother's grave we know we are going to pay £5 for the incense sticks but that is the price for the continued support of the ancestors.
The ritual is to place incense at the grave and then to place flowers and/or gifts there. It is not uncommon to see bottles of saki or tins of beer resting unopened on the grave stones. One could imagine how long they would last if such a tradition was practised in London!
Purple High Mountain arranges the flowers she has bought and generally tidies up the grave. I usually just stand back and let her sort all this out herself. For me it is like being a witness at a very personal event. I know from PHM that her grandmother meant the world to her. As HMiL worked and father was not PHM's favourite person, she would return from school to be looked after by grandmother.
PHM pours water over the headstone of the grave. This is part of the ritual, keeping the stone wet, and it has a certain elegance.
Next to grandmother's grave there are other family graves. In Japan cremation is the practice now. Each family has a family grave and the ashes of the family go into a compartment at the base of the grave. Here PHM is watering and attending to the graves of other ancestors within the family grouping.
The presence of the dead amongst the living is important in Japanese culture. Life is continuous even after death and the faces of ancestors stare down from dusty old photographs in most Japanese family homes. This continuity provides the Japanese people with a responsibility in life to look after and respect those who have been before. The graveyard is not a sombre isolated place visited for internment and then mostly forgotten. The graveyard is a point of connection, the connection of the past with the present, and therefore not to serve the graves and appropriately maintain them is to reject the past and bring misfortune on your family.
The temples and monks protect what it is to be Japanese, they are the guardians of the Japanese spiritual way of life and death. They do this in the Japanese way, with quietly crafted beauty and grace. Everyone knows that this all costs money and everyone pays willingly. The temples are very rich institutions but in the Japanese mind that is the way it should be. The spiritual past and the ancestors are not for compromise. If the monks need to drive then they should drive appropriate cars, no compromise.
Infiniti is the luxury automotive brand of Nissan and was launched in November 1989 exclusively for the North American market. It has since expanded to 15 countries including most of Europe. All Infiniti models are based on Nissan's FM platform, except for the QX56 full-size SUV, which is based on the F-Alpha truck platform. The brand's logo is an artistic interpretation of Japan's famous Mount Fuji.
Anyway, as tasteless as it might seem to have a gall bladder bouncing around over these pages like some sort of medical football (sorry about this imagery) the reason for me bringing this subject up is the usual dig at British doctors. You see my Ox Hammer insists on regular medical check ups for me when we are in Japan. The particular doctor we went to see this time had noticed a "thickening of the wall of the gall bladder" last January and decided it was worth monitoring the situation.
This contrasts starkly with my last GP who started shouting like a 9 year old when I told him that I had regular medicals in Japan. "This is all rubbish, complete rubbish, it does no-one any good and just creates anxieties that are unnecessary." he snapped anxiously. I calmly responded, "Well you are dealing with a different culture of medicine here and it is my wife's culture. In Japan they believe in preventative medicine, catching things before they become a major problem rather than dealing with major problems." That was when his anxiety levels hit the roof and he really started shouting at me. "This is all unnecessary, it's a complete waste of time......" I didn't hear anything else he said because I had got up and walked out. Typical arrogant British GP who treats patients like production line mushrooms.
What I love about the Japanese hospitals is the efficiencies. Obviously the scrupulous hygiene is attractive but the efficiencies are exquisite to the British eye. Apologies for the quality of the photo above however you will appreciate the technical difficulties I face as a cultural reporter photographing inside a hospital with a security guard standing by my shoulder. I can hardly ask him if he could hold a tripod whilst I check my settings. So the sneaky snap school of photography is the way forward.
The image above shows the accounts department. This is at the main entrance/exit and as you can see is well staffed (count the heads). There are about nine people behind that counter at most times and if you queue for more than a minute you are very unlucky. After leaving your appointment you go to this desk and present your hospital card. From that they can instantly read off your treatment and its costs. They then process that, provide you with a payment number and send you to the other side of the lobby where the payment machines are.
There are eight of these ATM style machines and when your number comes up on the big board (about a two minute wait) you progress to the machine, insert your hospital card and then pay in cash or by credit card. The money for your treatment is in the hospital bank account before you leave. As previously reported, in Japan everyone pays 30% of their medical costs but I, as a foreigner, get to pay 100%.
So we coughed up the required £5 for my consultation with the doctor that day. Obviously the tests I had gone through the previous week had been paid on that visit but even so those amounted to £48. So a total of £53 to make sure one part of my body is not a cause for concern. Perhaps that GP should consider popping over to Japan for an anxiety test!
With the Ox Hammer in tip top form now she knows her husband will live for another year she is up for buying me a beer. Wisely, I suggest that we should first visit Grandmother's grave. I didn't realise exactly how good a move that was until much later.
On our way we stopped to buy some postcards and I was particularly taken by the subject matter of some of them. Note the minimalist approach of the one second from the right. I bought that as a collectors item and no doubt will proudly show it off when back in the UK. "Have you seen my Japanese postcard collection? I only have one but it is a corker!"
The graveyards in Japan are tended by a temple within which sits a monk/monks who are always there to provide the best quality customer service. Remember that in the Japanese religious traditions the dead are a continuous source of income for many years after they transit over into the spiritual plane. Their journey to re-incarnation is fraught with dangers and so a rigid pattern of rituals needs to be performed at pre-determined intervals in the calender in order to ease that journey. Obviously, the more you pay for the rituals the higher status monk you get to perform a better level of ritual. You, or in this case your ancestor, only gets what you pay for.
After all, maintaining a graveyard and ensuring that the monks and their temple are all running smoothly requires more than just prayers. In Buddhism the material world is not all there is, all about us are the spiritual planes of existence and it is the task of the monks to interact and intercede with those ethereal realities. Life is an illusion and through self discipline and prayer the monks show the way towards nirvana and the path through which a soul can become a fully self realised being at one with Buddha.
The site of grandmother's grave (HMiL's honourable mother) is in the north of Tokyo. This is an urban landscape is filled with graveyards and temples, it is a city of the dead where the living abide right up to its edge. Each graveyard immaculately tended to, each temple guarded by gardens of flowers.
Grandmothers grave is a place we go to every time we are in Tokyo. Paying respect to the ancestors is a very important part of Japanese culture for all you have and are today relies on their smiling down on you. Each day we tend to the two shrines in the home, each visit to Japan we go to grandmother's grave and also to father's grave. Father is a duty and lies two hours outside of Tokyo in the home village, grandmother is a devotion, Ox Hammer loved, and still loves, her grandmother and spent a lot of her childhood with her.
We were fortunate to see a lotus flower, the season was not right but luck was with us. This was the first time I had seen one in bloom.
The temples and their gardens are in many ways the anchor of tradition in Japanese culture. This bedrock is a cultural artefact we have lost in the UK. Our churches have become culturally decentralised.
If you compare the fundamentalist baptist churches of London with the temples of Japan, the lack of value for money is apparent. In Japan the monks and the temples are an ever present cultural resource which provide a continuity of what it is to be Japanese. In London, Baptist ministers buy villas in Florida on the "church" credit card whilst operating their business out of a disused warehouse or cinema without any gardens whatsoever.
Japanese religions, as you would expect, are a much more efficient business model that believe in customer service and consumer value as an intrinsic part of the proposition. When we arrive at grandmother's grave we know we are going to pay £5 for the incense sticks but that is the price for the continued support of the ancestors.
The ritual is to place incense at the grave and then to place flowers and/or gifts there. It is not uncommon to see bottles of saki or tins of beer resting unopened on the grave stones. One could imagine how long they would last if such a tradition was practised in London!
Purple High Mountain arranges the flowers she has bought and generally tidies up the grave. I usually just stand back and let her sort all this out herself. For me it is like being a witness at a very personal event. I know from PHM that her grandmother meant the world to her. As HMiL worked and father was not PHM's favourite person, she would return from school to be looked after by grandmother.
PHM pours water over the headstone of the grave. This is part of the ritual, keeping the stone wet, and it has a certain elegance.
Next to grandmother's grave there are other family graves. In Japan cremation is the practice now. Each family has a family grave and the ashes of the family go into a compartment at the base of the grave. Here PHM is watering and attending to the graves of other ancestors within the family grouping.
The presence of the dead amongst the living is important in Japanese culture. Life is continuous even after death and the faces of ancestors stare down from dusty old photographs in most Japanese family homes. This continuity provides the Japanese people with a responsibility in life to look after and respect those who have been before. The graveyard is not a sombre isolated place visited for internment and then mostly forgotten. The graveyard is a point of connection, the connection of the past with the present, and therefore not to serve the graves and appropriately maintain them is to reject the past and bring misfortune on your family.
The temples and monks protect what it is to be Japanese, they are the guardians of the Japanese spiritual way of life and death. They do this in the Japanese way, with quietly crafted beauty and grace. Everyone knows that this all costs money and everyone pays willingly. The temples are very rich institutions but in the Japanese mind that is the way it should be. The spiritual past and the ancestors are not for compromise. If the monks need to drive then they should drive appropriate cars, no compromise.
Infiniti is the luxury automotive brand of Nissan and was launched in November 1989 exclusively for the North American market. It has since expanded to 15 countries including most of Europe. All Infiniti models are based on Nissan's FM platform, except for the QX56 full-size SUV, which is based on the F-Alpha truck platform. The brand's logo is an artistic interpretation of Japan's famous Mount Fuji.
source: Autoblog
On returning home my Ox Hammer told HMiL that my medical had proven positive and that after we had visited grandmother's grave. She approved.
"Quite right to, it is only because the ancestors are happy that Jack's health is good."
Monday, 2 July 2012
Tokyo Women, Fashion and Culture
This is a subject which is truly fascinating. If you come to these pages with a Western mind set then you will not see much as your perception will merely be projection; your view obscured by your own ideas. If there is an area of interest or study which requires or even demands an understanding of the issues of cross-cultural perceptions then the fashion on the streets of Tokyo has to be a litmus test.
In the years that I have been coming to Japan the fascination of street fashions has remained compelling. Often I have thought about writing on this subject but where do you actually begin? The other night I went out to Shinjuku with Purple High Mountain and the specific ambition to capture images of the fabled Tokyo Trotter (more on that taxonomy later) but, very strangely, this normally abundant and highly visible trend set was hard to spot that night. However, in about three hours we managed to capture over 300 images without really trying, you just stand there and fire away, the herds of shoppers are packed with observable enigmas.
If you are in any way serious but understanding Japan then you have to come to some understanding of this role of fashion in Japanese society. Failing to consider what it is you are actually seeing leaves you hopelessly exposed as a voyeur. No doubt some who come to these pages will do so only for their own gratification and, in the grand scheme of things, I suppose this has a certain validity (after all the ladies here all dress to look good and be seen) but such intellectual shallows lack the oxygen required to provide real insight and understanding. Whether you are wading or swimming, I am sure that the images here will provoke a response. Please feel free to comment in the space below.
Starting at the beginning, we left from Mushashi Koyama and stopped briefly for some chicken at the Yakitori stand. This is fast food Japanese style, mountains of chicken pieces skewered on sticks and piled on trays containing a trough of sauce. The charcoal ovens and grills mass produce this treat from all the bits of the chicken, liver, skin, flesh, and everyone gets stuck in. 200 yen a stick, about £1.50, and before you know it you have eaten six of them. Once fed we left for the tube.
As you can see the ladies like to dress, perhaps this is the same everywhere but in Tokyo, as we progress on our journey we will begin to see a variety of styles and dress sense simply not found "anywhere".
Obesity is not something generally associated with the Japanese. The diet and the lifestyle do not lend themselves to pigging out on junk fast food in front of the TV. As we have associated slenderness with beauty in the west, through the corruptive influence of the catwalk industry, it is natural to see all around you women who fit into that false, plastic mould of beauty we have forged in our own culture.
Japan though is a world away from what we think and believe. Far too often I have heard and read "opinion" on the Japanese which is simply a complete pile of horse shit. One commentator recently said, "Well of course the Japanese have become American consumers in reality.". Now there was a man who was straining his brain cell to the limit. Being Japanese is non-negotiable and in the world of Tokyo fashion, whilst at first glance it may seem to be filled with compromise and contradiction, all you see is actually truly Japanese.
Thankfully Japanese people love the camera and they generally love being photographed. Indeed, on this particular safari we found that a couple of the ladies we snapped appeared to keep returning within our range. Now this may have been due to particular shopping requirements or maybe the person concerned had got lost but almost certainly in a few cases they were coming back for the camera.
The ladies above point out one of the fundamentals of understanding Japan; shopping is one of the two major sports (the other is eating). Shopping is not an occupation or a hobby but a devotion, a very serious part of the day/week/month and no matter your age, shopping is a pre-requisite of being defined as a Japanese woman. The preferred territory of the compulsive Japanese shopper is the department store and all around you are examples of what I call department store chic.
All of this is fairly obvious stuff and one could easily argue that none of what has been said is really culturally exceptional. Well we are going to have to scratch the surface a bit more if we are going to get beyond the lipstick and into the underwear of the issue. The two key points which could be addressed to open up the discussion would immediately start to cause unease in the western mind; schoolgirls and breasts. We should perhaps start with the least contentious of these two and that would be the subject of breasts.
What is truly interesting about this paucity of melon smugglers [Starasts 1998] on the streets of Tokyo is that it also says something about Japanese ideas of sexuality. This is a much more interesting avenue of thought because it does highlight the cultural divide. Let's make sure that we understand why female breasts are such an important sexual traffic light.
The human female is the only member of the primate family which possesses constantly enlarged breasts in the adult form. Gorillas, Orang-utans, Chimpanzees etc., only have enlarged breasts when feeding young. The key difference between us and the other primates is that we are upright walking, we are the upright walking chimpanzee [Diamond 1992], and this physical position removes the buttocks from the line of sight of the eyes. In other primates the main sexual sign/stimulus/response mechanism relies on the buttocks which, when walking on all fours, are in the line of sight. Thus the view of female breasts acts directly on the sexual consciousness of the male keying into the formation of a "false buttocks" shape and reaching right down into the evolved cortex to activate ancient behavioural responses. Any woman with a healthy cleavage and a low cut dress will confirm this in ways an academic could only dream about!
So if the presence of cleavage is actually part of the sexual heritage of the human animal then the absence of its general display in Japanese society would appear to be a cultural issue. This is the issue of female modesty but also one of taste; open displays of breasts are basically perceived to be a vulgarity in the Japanese consciousness. In our western societies we may perhaps infer that this is an example of sexual prudishness but, I would contend, there is little that is prudish about the Japanese approach to sexuality. Indeed, any such attempt to label them as such would really be an example of cross cultural misunderstanding. Only in the west do we possess the ability to be a prude, it is after all a quality expressing the eternal compromise between the reality of life and the ridiculous moral incarceration of monotheistic mythologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
We should be looking at this whole issue from a very different perspective than western thinking, we should be looking at this issue from the position of Japanese thinking. To do this we also then need to consider the schoolgirl look. Before I left for Tokyo on this trip I was talking to one of the guys who was doing our building work back in the UK. His name was Paul, a nice, decent guy, the sort you wouldn't mind your daughter marrying (if you had a daughter that is). I made mention of the schoolgirls in Tokyo and as I did so I realised that Paul could easily interpret this as me being some sort of pervert with a schoolgirl fetish. That is the western moral position in a nutshell with regard to the word schoolgirl and all that surrounds it.
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Anyone who has spent any time in Tokyo cannot have missed the influence of the schoolgirl fashion model on society. My own niece here is about to go up into her secondary school and her main pre-occupation with the choice before her is the uniform on offer at the various schools. This primary concern with fashion is connected to ideas of being smart and presentable at all times. In Japan cleanliness and hygiene are pre-eminent virtues and the extension in terms of fashion is to be cleanly and smartly dressed.
Even if you are a social rebel your uniform of dissent is never grubby or worn, even in the department stores you will find the designer clothes for those who want to be different! One key incident that formed my opinions on this subject was an encounter with the East Tokyo Motorcycle Club. This happened at a service station on a motorway heading out towards Nagano a few years back. For over an hour on the road out of Tokyo a constant stream of chopped motor bikes passed us with riders sporting the cut down denim jacket and the MC style logo on the back for East Tokyo. There were hundreds of them on the road that day (when the Japanese join a club they always do so in numbers!).
Later at the service station I had the chance to look at them close up. What struck me was how clean and tidy they all were, the concept of a motorcycle "greaser" was a million miles away from where these guys were coming from. As one of their number gilded slowly into the parking area on a mightily chopped and mean machine, what glinted more than the sparkling chrome of the engine housing was lightning flashes of reflected sunlight coming off of his Gucci sunglasses. I just knew in that moment that there was a department store section entitled "Motorcycle Club Fashion: You Being Two Wheels.". Even when the Japanese rebel they do it fashionably, after all, no-one wants to be anti-social!
But when individuality is something you buy off the peg in the department store then being able to create your own look takes a certain creative skill. In many ways this is what I see in Tokyo street fashion. Many times I look at the girls and think, "What the hell was she thinking when she put that lot together?" but then when you consider that this fashion conscious society provides few outlets for individual expression, suddenly the world of the Tokyo streets opens up in another interpretation for you. These girls are very much saying "This is me!". But even when they do there still remains that primal template of the schoolgirl (as seen above).
Large breasts on display is not the dominant sexuality motif of Japanese society, the schoolgirl takes that place. At every convenience store you will see men standing at the comic magazine stand reading the animi soft porn. They read it in the shops before purchase, they read it on the subway trains and they keep it in their briefcases. At each stand there are covers displaying drawings of schoolgirls in various states of disarray. This is normal behaviour in Japan, try sitting on a tube train in London with such material and you stand a good chance of being lynched. That is a cultural difference. That is what happens when a dominant metaphor in one cultural mythology has a different meaning in another cultural mythology.
In our culture, with all of its current politically correct health and safety madness, the mention of the word schoolgirl is enough to cast grave doubts about your character if not actually be a criminal offence. In Japanese culture the schoolgirl look is a symbol of youth, purity and emerging sexuality and recognised as such without having to then suffer with some sort of socially collective chest beating anguish or guilt. Fundamentally the reason for this difference is our shackles to that old moral dungeon master, monotheistic mythology. We were thrown out of Eden by our vengeful God, cast into a separation from the divine, set apart from nature and all because of women and sex (remember ladies that the monotheistic myth is a male myth with a male god and therefore definitely sexist). In that myth structure we are at odds with the world and nature and our role is to pacify the natural world and deny our natural instincts. We are all to become men of god, even the women too.
You may say that you are not a Jew, a Christian or Islamic (all of which worship exactly the same God but kill each other for not worshipping that God in exactly the same way: insanity) but within that western psyche the worm has buried itself deep within the apple. Even the avid atheist in the western world is riddled with malicious monotheistic viral code effecting their behaviour.
In oriental mythology there never was a separation of the human from creation. In this mythology we are all part of everything and everything is part of us. Sexual guilt is not on the moral agenda, in fact guilt itself is something that is a very confusing emotional phenomena for those who have no sin on their souls and do not have to make account of that sin before the vengeful god on the day of reckoning. Relieved of this heavy baggage, but still with some culturally specific bags of their own, the Japanese do not see a problem in the "Alice in Wonderland" fashion statement. Yes, women in their twenties actually wear this style and a lot more we would find odd in the west. But we are not in the west are we.
Looking at anything from a cross cultural position should teach you two main lessons. The first is always about who you are and what you think. Until you can work out why it is you see the world in the way you do you have absolutely no chance of really understanding another culture. Until you have a depth perspective on how it is you construct your own opinions all you will ever do is project those opinions on other people in other places and other times. The second lesson is obvious once you have learnt the first.
In the years that I have been coming to Japan the fascination of street fashions has remained compelling. Often I have thought about writing on this subject but where do you actually begin? The other night I went out to Shinjuku with Purple High Mountain and the specific ambition to capture images of the fabled Tokyo Trotter (more on that taxonomy later) but, very strangely, this normally abundant and highly visible trend set was hard to spot that night. However, in about three hours we managed to capture over 300 images without really trying, you just stand there and fire away, the herds of shoppers are packed with observable enigmas.
If you are in any way serious but understanding Japan then you have to come to some understanding of this role of fashion in Japanese society. Failing to consider what it is you are actually seeing leaves you hopelessly exposed as a voyeur. No doubt some who come to these pages will do so only for their own gratification and, in the grand scheme of things, I suppose this has a certain validity (after all the ladies here all dress to look good and be seen) but such intellectual shallows lack the oxygen required to provide real insight and understanding. Whether you are wading or swimming, I am sure that the images here will provoke a response. Please feel free to comment in the space below.
Starting at the beginning, we left from Mushashi Koyama and stopped briefly for some chicken at the Yakitori stand. This is fast food Japanese style, mountains of chicken pieces skewered on sticks and piled on trays containing a trough of sauce. The charcoal ovens and grills mass produce this treat from all the bits of the chicken, liver, skin, flesh, and everyone gets stuck in. 200 yen a stick, about £1.50, and before you know it you have eaten six of them. Once fed we left for the tube.
As you can see the ladies like to dress, perhaps this is the same everywhere but in Tokyo, as we progress on our journey we will begin to see a variety of styles and dress sense simply not found "anywhere".
Obesity is not something generally associated with the Japanese. The diet and the lifestyle do not lend themselves to pigging out on junk fast food in front of the TV. As we have associated slenderness with beauty in the west, through the corruptive influence of the catwalk industry, it is natural to see all around you women who fit into that false, plastic mould of beauty we have forged in our own culture.
Japan though is a world away from what we think and believe. Far too often I have heard and read "opinion" on the Japanese which is simply a complete pile of horse shit. One commentator recently said, "Well of course the Japanese have become American consumers in reality.". Now there was a man who was straining his brain cell to the limit. Being Japanese is non-negotiable and in the world of Tokyo fashion, whilst at first glance it may seem to be filled with compromise and contradiction, all you see is actually truly Japanese.
Thankfully Japanese people love the camera and they generally love being photographed. Indeed, on this particular safari we found that a couple of the ladies we snapped appeared to keep returning within our range. Now this may have been due to particular shopping requirements or maybe the person concerned had got lost but almost certainly in a few cases they were coming back for the camera.
The ladies above point out one of the fundamentals of understanding Japan; shopping is one of the two major sports (the other is eating). Shopping is not an occupation or a hobby but a devotion, a very serious part of the day/week/month and no matter your age, shopping is a pre-requisite of being defined as a Japanese woman. The preferred territory of the compulsive Japanese shopper is the department store and all around you are examples of what I call department store chic.
All of this is fairly obvious stuff and one could easily argue that none of what has been said is really culturally exceptional. Well we are going to have to scratch the surface a bit more if we are going to get beyond the lipstick and into the underwear of the issue. The two key points which could be addressed to open up the discussion would immediately start to cause unease in the western mind; schoolgirls and breasts. We should perhaps start with the least contentious of these two and that would be the subject of breasts.
As much as you wander around Tokyo you will find it hard to see European levels of cleavage displayed on the streets. This is not to say that are no sexual displays of breasts, for that is exactly what low cleavage dresses represent, because of course there are some Tokyo girls who go in for this type of fashion. However they are in the absolute and almost invisible minority.
We could listen to those who would argue that Japanese women are not generally physically possessed of breasts substantial enough to mount a decent display and that accounts for this fashion phenomenon. We could but let's not bother taking on board such a poor racist, sexist argument. This absence of something we see daily in the west is a cultural difference and relates to a conservative idea of female modesty.
The human female is the only member of the primate family which possesses constantly enlarged breasts in the adult form. Gorillas, Orang-utans, Chimpanzees etc., only have enlarged breasts when feeding young. The key difference between us and the other primates is that we are upright walking, we are the upright walking chimpanzee [Diamond 1992], and this physical position removes the buttocks from the line of sight of the eyes. In other primates the main sexual sign/stimulus/response mechanism relies on the buttocks which, when walking on all fours, are in the line of sight. Thus the view of female breasts acts directly on the sexual consciousness of the male keying into the formation of a "false buttocks" shape and reaching right down into the evolved cortex to activate ancient behavioural responses. Any woman with a healthy cleavage and a low cut dress will confirm this in ways an academic could only dream about!
So if the presence of cleavage is actually part of the sexual heritage of the human animal then the absence of its general display in Japanese society would appear to be a cultural issue. This is the issue of female modesty but also one of taste; open displays of breasts are basically perceived to be a vulgarity in the Japanese consciousness. In our western societies we may perhaps infer that this is an example of sexual prudishness but, I would contend, there is little that is prudish about the Japanese approach to sexuality. Indeed, any such attempt to label them as such would really be an example of cross cultural misunderstanding. Only in the west do we possess the ability to be a prude, it is after all a quality expressing the eternal compromise between the reality of life and the ridiculous moral incarceration of monotheistic mythologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
We should be looking at this whole issue from a very different perspective than western thinking, we should be looking at this issue from the position of Japanese thinking. To do this we also then need to consider the schoolgirl look. Before I left for Tokyo on this trip I was talking to one of the guys who was doing our building work back in the UK. His name was Paul, a nice, decent guy, the sort you wouldn't mind your daughter marrying (if you had a daughter that is). I made mention of the schoolgirls in Tokyo and as I did so I realised that Paul could easily interpret this as me being some sort of pervert with a schoolgirl fetish. That is the western moral position in a nutshell with regard to the word schoolgirl and all that surrounds it.
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Anyone who has spent any time in Tokyo cannot have missed the influence of the schoolgirl fashion model on society. My own niece here is about to go up into her secondary school and her main pre-occupation with the choice before her is the uniform on offer at the various schools. This primary concern with fashion is connected to ideas of being smart and presentable at all times. In Japan cleanliness and hygiene are pre-eminent virtues and the extension in terms of fashion is to be cleanly and smartly dressed.
Even if you are a social rebel your uniform of dissent is never grubby or worn, even in the department stores you will find the designer clothes for those who want to be different! One key incident that formed my opinions on this subject was an encounter with the East Tokyo Motorcycle Club. This happened at a service station on a motorway heading out towards Nagano a few years back. For over an hour on the road out of Tokyo a constant stream of chopped motor bikes passed us with riders sporting the cut down denim jacket and the MC style logo on the back for East Tokyo. There were hundreds of them on the road that day (when the Japanese join a club they always do so in numbers!).
Later at the service station I had the chance to look at them close up. What struck me was how clean and tidy they all were, the concept of a motorcycle "greaser" was a million miles away from where these guys were coming from. As one of their number gilded slowly into the parking area on a mightily chopped and mean machine, what glinted more than the sparkling chrome of the engine housing was lightning flashes of reflected sunlight coming off of his Gucci sunglasses. I just knew in that moment that there was a department store section entitled "Motorcycle Club Fashion: You Being Two Wheels.". Even when the Japanese rebel they do it fashionably, after all, no-one wants to be anti-social!
But when individuality is something you buy off the peg in the department store then being able to create your own look takes a certain creative skill. In many ways this is what I see in Tokyo street fashion. Many times I look at the girls and think, "What the hell was she thinking when she put that lot together?" but then when you consider that this fashion conscious society provides few outlets for individual expression, suddenly the world of the Tokyo streets opens up in another interpretation for you. These girls are very much saying "This is me!". But even when they do there still remains that primal template of the schoolgirl (as seen above).
Large breasts on display is not the dominant sexuality motif of Japanese society, the schoolgirl takes that place. At every convenience store you will see men standing at the comic magazine stand reading the animi soft porn. They read it in the shops before purchase, they read it on the subway trains and they keep it in their briefcases. At each stand there are covers displaying drawings of schoolgirls in various states of disarray. This is normal behaviour in Japan, try sitting on a tube train in London with such material and you stand a good chance of being lynched. That is a cultural difference. That is what happens when a dominant metaphor in one cultural mythology has a different meaning in another cultural mythology.
In our culture, with all of its current politically correct health and safety madness, the mention of the word schoolgirl is enough to cast grave doubts about your character if not actually be a criminal offence. In Japanese culture the schoolgirl look is a symbol of youth, purity and emerging sexuality and recognised as such without having to then suffer with some sort of socially collective chest beating anguish or guilt. Fundamentally the reason for this difference is our shackles to that old moral dungeon master, monotheistic mythology. We were thrown out of Eden by our vengeful God, cast into a separation from the divine, set apart from nature and all because of women and sex (remember ladies that the monotheistic myth is a male myth with a male god and therefore definitely sexist). In that myth structure we are at odds with the world and nature and our role is to pacify the natural world and deny our natural instincts. We are all to become men of god, even the women too.
You may say that you are not a Jew, a Christian or Islamic (all of which worship exactly the same God but kill each other for not worshipping that God in exactly the same way: insanity) but within that western psyche the worm has buried itself deep within the apple. Even the avid atheist in the western world is riddled with malicious monotheistic viral code effecting their behaviour.
In oriental mythology there never was a separation of the human from creation. In this mythology we are all part of everything and everything is part of us. Sexual guilt is not on the moral agenda, in fact guilt itself is something that is a very confusing emotional phenomena for those who have no sin on their souls and do not have to make account of that sin before the vengeful god on the day of reckoning. Relieved of this heavy baggage, but still with some culturally specific bags of their own, the Japanese do not see a problem in the "Alice in Wonderland" fashion statement. Yes, women in their twenties actually wear this style and a lot more we would find odd in the west. But we are not in the west are we.
Looking at anything from a cross cultural position should teach you two main lessons. The first is always about who you are and what you think. Until you can work out why it is you see the world in the way you do you have absolutely no chance of really understanding another culture. Until you have a depth perspective on how it is you construct your own opinions all you will ever do is project those opinions on other people in other places and other times. The second lesson is obvious once you have learnt the first.
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