"He came back from Japan looking different, somehow..." I suppose I've always been fascinated by watching someone -- a pop star who's moved up to the international level of success, or a friend who's moved to another country -- being visibly changed by the encounter. It might be someone British and working class who becomes a musician and starts traveling the world, and presently you notice exotic influences rubbing off on them in the way they dress, and the sound of their music. John Lydon discovers Jamaica!
But it's not as simple as that. In most industrialised places you travel to these days, clothes and music have a flattened, globalised feel. A Gap or Uniqlo or Muji t-shirt looks pretty much the same in Tokyo or New York; it's probably made in China, wherever you buy it. (I'm talking about travel within Europe, the Americas, Asia; India, Indonesia and Africa are different in that they still have mainstream regional dress styles, which makes them very interesting. By the same token, though, they don't consume Western pop music, which makes it harder for a Western musician to travel there.)
In this kind of global system, the sort of national identity you could consume by buying clothes on your travels is available only as a quirky niche product for tourists and internal tourists. You encounter a post-national nationalism (a coquettish nationalism primped for the age of globalism) in certain shops. In fact, they're specifically the kind of shops I buy my clothes in, which is why I've ended up looking like some sort of weird parody of a Japanese person from a former age.
The jacket I'm wearing in the photo above comes from Kamawanu, which is a little shop in trad Japanese style up a side street in Daikanyama. Visits to Cosmic Wonder and United Bamboo have left me unimpressed; both these designers seem to have made steps towards the Gap-Uniqlo mainstream by making subtle, clever or conceptual versions of global American-collegiate clothes. Kamawanu, with its rows of gorgeous tenuguis, excites me because its references are entirely Japanese. Here I can indulge my fascination with kabuki, arcane Japanese uniforms, pilgrims and monks, otherness and particularity.
Kamawanu is at the conservative end of the spectrum; their patterns, though gorgeous, are hardly innovative. For a splash of modernity with your tradition, try Sou Sou on Omote Sando. Originally from Kyoto (the mothership for trad-inspired Japanese design), Sou Sou does a great line in bold and flashy tabi shoes and socks. In the photo above I'm let down by my plastic crocs; a pair of Sou Sou tabi trainers is clearly in order.
Their clothes similarly elevate everyday Japan, using stitched motifs (handmade combini logos, cigarette packet motifs, funny faces) to give a local specificity to the generic products churned out by the global clothes mills.
I've also been impressed by Theatre Products, an ambitious and original clothing company with a store in LaForet called Stripe ("Stripe, symbol for eternity... Stripe is continuous and never ending!"). For gm ten gallery's September culture event in the Nasu countryside, Spectacle in the Farm, Theatre Products put on a fashion show in which models pulled (sometimes reluctant) farm animals about. Sure, the herded sheep and paraded alpacas might have brought Marie Antoinette to mind rather than anything specifically Japanese, but there was also something very Terayama, very Art Theatre Guild, about it (as there is about Theatre Products' logo).
Do you want flavours to go global, or one global flavour to go everywhere? Globalisation is clearly a sword with two edges; it has the flattening, monocultural capacity to make everywhere on earth look like exactly the same place, but also the amazing capacity to spread far and wide gloriously odd specificities it took cultures centuries to arrive at. Through tourism and other forms of cultural exchange, globalisation can also make local cultures think more clearly about the value of their own specific differences (actually seeing them as "differences" rather than "errors" is already a huge step).
But there's a paradoxical universalism in this "globalism of flavour"; I actually feel weirdly Scottish dressed in my "Japanese" gear. I feel like Tam O' Shanter having visions on the road to Kamakura.
Momus performs a 45-minute live set tonight at gm ten gallery, Azabu-Juban, at 2100. Entry is 1000 yen (includes free drink).
A lovely Sunday afternoon with our friends Digiki and Haruna, Alin and Meta in Nishi-Shinjuku, where Antonin (Digiki) now has a whole house in the shadow of the skyscraper district. We ate lunch sitting on the sunny roof, then flambéed crepes in Grand Marnier in the washitsu room below while Hisae and Meta batted balloons about.
Alin then fine-tuned a spindly-racy blue bike he's letting me borrow, and we made a trip to the local bike shop to refurbish Antonin's milk-white racer. It was nearly 8pm on a Sunday evening, but the bike shops in Tokyo were all still open -- something that would be unheard of in Berlin.
The bookshops and department stores were all open too, so we headed down (five of us on three bikes) to Shibuya, where Alin and Antonin planned to show me Shibuya Booksellers, a fashionable new (well, new to me, anyway) art and design bookstore. It was open, but there was a presentation of some kind going on. We recognised Nakako Hayashi sitting by the window:
Nakako Hayashi is the editor of Here and There magazine, which is a wonderful and peculiar beast, a self-published magazine featuring Hayashi's small but compelling world, comprised of people like Susan Ciancolo, Elein Fleiss and Yukinori Maeda of Cosmic Wonder. It exists at the spiritual-ethical-aesthetic end of fashion.
In this interesting TAB interview Hayashi tells her story; how she started with Shiseido's magazine Hanatsubaki in the late 80s, then started her own magazine around the turn of the century, getting the brilliant Kazunari Hattori to do the design. The latest edition of Here and There -- launched in tandem with a show at Utrecht in September -- is No. 9, subtitled Her Life. Nakako also keeps a blog.
Alin Huma also showed me an elegant little publication he's made, the catalogue for his nascent bike company Fin de Cycle. Since Alin never does anything with less than impeccable visual standards, both the bicycles he's offering for sale and the catalogue itself are far beyond the call of commercial duty. I think that aestheticism-beyond-the-call-of-duty is one of the things I appreciate most here in Japan, whether it's in Alin's bike-love, Hayashi's magazine, or Shibuya Booksellers' store design. They didn't have to be as great as they are; nothing but love forced them.
Shinro Ohtake has already popped up in this blog; Hisae and I are hoping to visit his Naoshima Bathhouse -- a fanciful sento featuring a stuffed elephant -- in January. But Shinro has another major achievement, far from the Seto Inland Sea. In a series of massive picture books filled with photographs, drawings and scrap memorabilia (but particularly UK 77) Ohtake has documented seventies London better, to my mind, than any British artist or photographer.
It's not that Ohtake -- aged 22 in 1977, he'd just graduated from Musashino Art University -- avoids the punk rock cliches that now pass for cultural history of the late 70s in the UK. His photos show us that Bozz Scaggs. Elkie Brooks, Elton John and The Enid featured on UK posters in 1977 rather more than The Damned and The Sex Pistols did, but he has plenty of shots of punk rockers, and clippings from the snarky music press and listings magazines. It's rather that Ohtake shows the entire context; views out of the window, tickets from gigs, confectionery wrappers, books of matches with adverts on them.
What comes as a shock is how much of the UK in 1977 was stuck in the 1960s; there are silly little Hillman Imp cars, and ridiculous child-molester hairstyles in the barber windows, trickledown domestications from the wilder shores of 1960s subculture. It's all pretty grim and muddy, but it does show you where punk's disgust came from. And it's telling that it takes a Japanese photographer -- a sort of impartial Martian in this weird and depressing landscape -- to document the UK properly. Sitting in gm ten gallery flipping through Ohtake's back pages, I was completely transported back to the era, with exactly the right combination of repulsion and nostalgia, shudder and swoon.
There was a very different experience waiting for us at the studio of a very different photographer, Meisa Fujishiro, yesterday. Fujishiro is a girly photographer known for his fast, loose, appetising gravure shots of girls, and books like Milky Hips (collections of women showing their bottoms in various locations). Just before vacating his Aoyama studio, Fujishiro has plastered the walls with snapshots and furnished the room with comfy chairs, tables laden with gravure books of pretty girls, and Michael Jackson's greatest hits pumping out of the stereo.
The overall feeling I got from Meisa's photographs was of how much he likes girls, how much girls like being girls, and how I've wasted my life being a singer rather than being Meisa Fujishiro. I mean, seriously, to do this and get paid for it too? How much better could life get?
In June of last year I penned an eloquent elegy for the endangered bukkake genre of Japanese porn. So what seems to be replacing that Shinto ritual of repression and release? Since nature -- and porn -- abhors a vacuum, what new fetishes are represented on the combini racks and the DVD shelves of Japan, in the areas designed to get customers a little hot, shifty and breathless?
One answer seems to be provided by a magazine I spotted in my local Family Mart last night, while buying wholesome things like Muji stationery and soup. Boyish GALS is, to be pedantic, a one-shot mook shrink-wrapped with a DVD. I didn't buy it, but as a keen amateur sociologist I couldn't let it go unnoted in these pages.
My analysis of bukkake inevitably raised Shinto's focus on seed -- and agrarian fertility in general -- as a framing device. Using that same frame, what does the rise of "boyish gal" porn tell us about the Japanese sexual psyche in late 2009? Is it a gay development, or a feminist one, or some kind of softcore misogyny, or part of a semi-hikikomori fear of the otherness of the other sex?
One mook doesn't make a winter; I don't think it would be fair to say that a desire for Japanese women to become more boyish represents a step towards sterility and austerity. Certainly you could say that bukkake, invented in 1986 at the height of Japan's profligate economic bubble, represents a certain spendthrift tendency, a gloriously reckless waste of the national seed (something like the necessary lack of necessity Bataille built into his idea of the accursed share). By contrast, a trend for boyish gals would represent mere thrift. A boyish gal won't (in symbolic terms) give birth, which in turn means you won't end up paying money to bring up a child in a difficult world of recession, economic downturn, and so on.
But we should look at this in a wider context. This is an age where pregnancy and giving birth is very highly valued in Japan. The new government is promising wads of extra money to parents, conscious that something needs to be done about Japan's longterm demographic decline. Magazines like Crea (which recently featured a heavily-pregnant Kahimi Karie) and MiLK (Isshiki Sae) have recently fetished female fertility as never before.
It's worth noting the target audiences of these magazines, though. Boyish GALS is aimed at men, whereas Crea and MiLK are women's magazines. Could it be that while Japanese "grass-eating" men (the kind for whom even having a real girlfriend is mendokusai; too much hassle, too costly) dream of ever-less-fertile, ever-more-boyish women, Japanese women fantasize themselves as massive matriarchal baby machines with ever-bigger, ever-more-fruitful bellies?
Bukkake is hardly a fertile genre, if you think about it; sperm delivered to the wrong areas won't make babies. So perhaps it's less a question of fertility falling out of fashion in hard times, and more a question of men liking their sex non-reproductive and women liking it fruitful? We'll continue our penetrating investigations into Japanese fertility when we have more data; watch this space.
Sure, sure, sure, Tokyo's all steel, plastic and concrete. They don't let anything get old here; they tear it down and rebuild it all bland and sterile the moment anything approaching "charming patina" encroaches. But, but, but there are nooks and niches where old things persist. Oldie restaurants, for instance.
This is Ajitome in Sangenjaya, for instance. We brought Hisae's fried Satoshi to this fugu restaurant last night because we loved it last time we came... despite the presence of "research whale" on the menu.
Ajitome has classic oldie charm; the two obasantatchi who run the place have a Breughel look and a pleasant scatty informality; they heap used plates up on a messy table, and often come and plonk themselves down to chat with the customers. Their headscarves, neckerchiefs, monogrammed aprons and hairstyles impress me much more than anything I see in Harajuku; somehow they remind me of characters in a Miyazaki animation.
Another scatty-charming oldie patina dive we've loved is a little Chinese-influenced place near the JR line Otsuka stop (it's on the way to Misako and Rosen gallery).
The 84 year-old sole operator of this quiet but fascinating place told us he started the restaurant in 1959. His living quarters are directly behind it, divided from the eating space by a step and a sliding door, with a pair of slip-on shoes waiting on the concrete floor of the restaurant.
All the crockery in the little eatery was marked with the restaurant's phone number, presumably so you could report missing items that turned up elsewhere. But the plates must've been made in the 50s; Tokyo's phone numbers have long since acquired a few extra digits.
The Otsuka proprietor was a bit deaf, but friendly. His hobby wasn't hard to guess; the place was littered with fishing magazines.
An open letter to the women of Japan Dear women of Japan, walking around the streets of your delightful capital, Tokyo, and catching your eye on trains, on escalators, on the street and in stores, I can't help noticing your perplexed reactions to me, Momo. "What the fuck is that?" you seem to be saying to yourselves. "Is it a clown? Will it produce some balls and start juggling? Or is it just an old, ugly, ridiculously-dressed gaijin who thinks he'll score points with us by trying to look 'interesting' in a totally weird way?"
I, Momo, have seen these thoughts passing all-too-obviously through your head, and been slightly saddened, I must confess. Yes, I'm old, and foreign, and a bit eccentric. Sure, I could pass for Momo the Clown, or some kind of walking black flower. But there's something you should know. I am, more or less, Nino.
Nino. Ninomiya from boy band Arashi. He's your favourite current man, isn't he? He's everywhere, with his child-monkey charm and delicate, intelligent, feminine features. Look, there, in the Wii SuperMario Brothers poster! And here in the au by KDDI commercial!
What a fun boyfriend Nino would be! What good children he'd make, and how well he'd help you raise them! You dream of Arashi, you keep them under your pillow and take them out at night, and when anyone asks your favourite you say "Nino!" If you saw him on the street you'd scream. But if you saw Momo on the street... well, you'd scream!
And that's what I'm writing to tell you today. There's actually a lot less difference than you think between Momo and Nino! We both make you scream, that's a start! But it goes so much deeper than that! Let me prove to you that Momo equals Nino, more or less!
Up to 60% of the human body is water, which means that me and Nino are already 60% the same thing. Water! It's not like Nino's water is sexy and Momo's is weird. No, that 60% majority component of Nino and Momo is identical. Water!
It doesn't stop there, either. Nino and Momo both have two eyes, a nose, a mouth on the front of our heads. Okay, Momo has one eye that's shriveled like a grape, so let's give him 75% eyes compared with Nino's 100% eyes, but, you know, 75% ain't bad, girls! Momo has less hair than Nino, but, you know, it's hair!
And look at their jobs! Momo and Nino are both singers! Okay, Arashi might perform at the Yokohama Arena while Momo just sings karaoke over an iPod at a Tokyo art gallery, but what's an audience gap of tens of thousands when the profession is the same?
There are some other striking similarities. Momo's middle name is John, and Nino is managed by Johnny's Entertainment. Nino is hot, Momo is not, but there's only one letter difference between those words, which makes them 66% the same. Nino's sperm is young and healthy, whereas Momo produces slightly damaged old man sperm, but even old man sperm can make a perfectly good baby, if you don't mind the fact that it wouldn't be racially 100% pure (it would, though, be racially 50% pure, which is good enough for anyone except sticklers).
I want to conclude this open letter to you, dear Women of Japan, by saying, in your delightful language, yoroshiku; be nice to me. Next time you see me on the street, say to yourself "There -- but for a few insignificant details and my own blind Darwinian prejudices -- walks Nino from Arashi!" And allow yourself a small scream. A nice, excited scream, not the terrified one you normally do.
Yesterday I had a nice meeting with the charming Hiroshi Eguchi, who runs Utrecht. The art bookstore began as a by-appointment-only operation in his Nakameguro apartment, then opened at Utrecht Reading Room, an understated upstairs hideaway featuring a bookstore, cafe and gallery next door to Yohji Yamamoto, up at the Nezu Museum end of overstated Omote Sando.
Sitting out on his back balcony at the Omote Sando space, Hiroshi told me the lease on the building runs for the next three years at least, and in the meantime he's working on re-opening some kind of bookstore up on the roof of his Nakameguro apartment building. He thanked me for mentioning Utrecht in the New York Times, told me how much he likes Motto in Berlin, then proceeded to set up a Momus event at Utrecht on December 27th.
So, from 6-8pm on Sunday December 27th I'm happy to say I'll be giving an Unreliable Tour of the Yusuke Machiba drawing exhibition in the Utrecht Reading Room gallery, Now Idea. Entry will be 1000 yen, which includes a free drink. Utrecht Reading Room is a two-minute walk from Exit A5 of Omotesando Station on the Ginza, Chiyoda and Hanzomon Lines. Address: 5-3-8-201, Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062.
Before I was a curator I was a singer, you know! Momus: The Singing Curator -- Live! On December 22nd "gm ten" proudly presents a 45-minute live set from Momus, the Scottish singer, songwriter and producer best known in Japan for his work with Kahimi Karie. The Berlin-based Momus, visiting Japan this month in the role of an art curator, has agreed to perform a short set of his songs at "gm ten" Gallery. He'll take a break from preparing Aftergold, a major exhibition of Japanese art to be held in the UK in 2012, to sing songs written over the past twenty years. There will also be a guest appearance from Yukiko Sawabe.
[Date] 2009.12.22(Tue) Open 20:30 / Start 21:00 [Place] gm ten Sanwa 2nd Bldg 3rd Floor, 4-1-7 Azabu-Jyuban, Minato-ku, 106-0045 Tokyo Japan -3mins Walk from Azabu-juban station on the Tokyo Metoro Nanboku line (exit 3 or 4) -6mins Walk from Azabu-juban station on the Toei Oedo line (exit 3 or 4) [Charge] 1,000yen (Music fee + 1Drink) [Live] Momus with Special Guest, Yukiko Sawabe [DJ] Mao Yamazaki (gm projects / AKICHI RECORDS) Ryo Aoyanagi (gm projects / AKICHI RECORDS) [Reservation (not essential, but recommended)] send email to info@gmprojects.jp subject line: MOMUS LIVE (1) your name (2) the number of persons (3) phone number
You know me by now; I'm Momus, the well-known web interpreter from the town of Bzrkyr in Upper Trilesian Osnia. To take a break from -- and freshen myself spiritually for -- my duties (studying the web, facilitating the improvement of my students' moral character, expounding the holy laws), I like to travel, and Japan has become a favourite destination. What I like about Japan is that it's different from Upper Trilesian Osnia, but not too different. Basically, today's Japanese are very much like Upper Trilesian Osnians in the 1950s.
Here I am at the "Hachiko" crossing in front of Shibuya Station. Now, a yokel would probably go crazy and dance around and say "Wow, look at the lights! Such big video screens!" But I take this crossing very much in my stride. We have a similar square in Bzrkyr with even more TV screens -- super-miniature ones the Japanese haven't even invented yet -- and even more people running around. In Bzrkyr you'd have seventeen realistic dogs yapping at your ankles rather than one lumpen statue dog sitting on a pedestal. In fact, compared to the Krsyzicnny Crossing, this place is tame and quiet; ideal for a bit of relaxation. (Give it a decade or so, though, and I expect it'll be indistinguishable from any Trilesian town.)
Ah, here's a cinema! Quaint! In Upper Trilesian Osnia we don't have these fleapits any more. We download joke videos from YouTube, household accidents, that sort of thing. If the Japanese still apparently have the attention span to sit for ninety minutes in a dark hall in a building draped with metal curtains, well, good on them, I say! They should enjoy it while they can, because -- if Upper Trilesian Osnian developments are anything to go by -- it'll soon be "curtains" for this type of entertainment.
A Trilesian also gets a good waft of nostalgia entering a place like Libro Books, in the basement of the Parco department store. Both department stores and magazines long ago disappeared from Upper Trilesian Osnia, replaced by outdoor markets and word of mouth, so this kind of place feels like a museum to us. When I took the picture above the "sales assistant" asked me what I was doing and I just chuckled. I was tempted to say: "Just wait a couple of decades, my friend! Photos like this will be the only evidence that this Libro place ever existed!" But, you know, the first law of time travel is that you're not allowed to influence the past. We have to leave it to the Japanese to discover the future in their own time, and their own way.
What could be nicer after a stressful day not-shopping (we Upper Trilesian Osnians are so over consumerism, though the Japanese are only starting to make the most tentative steps in this direction) than a cup of iced chai in a Jungle Cafe? I can't really say that without blushing a bit inside; back in the day, it's whispered, Upper Trilesian Osnia had dozens of these Jungle Cafes, places where people could escape the icy weather and indulge in fantasies of the tropics while sipping coconut juice. Later, of course, it was considered politically off-colour to talk about "the jungle" or create reductive masquerade versions of "cafes in hot places". Now in Upper Trilesian Osnia the cafes are freezing, as they bloody well ought to be. I expect Japanese cafes will be too, soon enough. In the meantime, relaxing on fantasy wicker furniture surrounded by fake jungle is, I have to confess, a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Might as well enjoy it before the Japanese come to their senses.
Japan is -- continues to be -- the most different society I know. While it may superficially look like any number of other advanced modern cultures, this place has something very, very strange going on just below the surface. I've been fishing about for a word or phrase to describe one important dimension of this strangeness, a thing I pick up here as I move around. The first word that occurs to me is "motherlove". But perhaps a better term would be "ambient impersonal tenderness". Japan is a society shockingly full of ambient impersonal tenderness, overlapping with tender-mindedness, shading into tweeness.
I catch glimpses of this in the difference between what my defensive reflexes tell me reality is like, and what the Japanese reality often turns out to be. For instance, yesterday I caught sight of what looked like a plate of smashed glass in the wall beside me. Reflexively, my brain made a little story, a story that would be plausible in Berlin but not here: "Anti-globalism protesters have smashed the glass to show their resentment against a world system they feel excludes and alienates them." In Berlin it's very common to see smashed glass in bank or office windows, and anarchist or anti-globalist slogans left as a sort of signature.
But on second glance I see that the "smashed" pane is actually covered by a protective plastic sheet, wrinkled in such a way that it makes the glass look shattered. This is Tokyo, not Berlin. My thoughts drift to an exhibition by Yoko Ono of holes shot in sheets of glass, a show called A Hole I saw the other day at Gallery 360. Ono invites viewers to look through the violent hole in the glass (which recalls Lennon's smashed, bloody glasses on the cover of her Season of Glass album) and use it as a way to frame a new view of the world. One reading of this show, seen in Tokyo, is that a Japanese woman is saying to Japanese people: "The society I have adopted as my home is a much more violent one than the one we're used to; look, someone shot my husband. Violence can easily become a way of framing our view of the world."
But daily life in Japan is the opposite of violent. Take the panel discussion I attended at Vacant the other night. The last panel discussion I attended in Berlin turned into a weird attack, by all the other panelists, on a man who goes regularly to Africa to collect ethnic music for his record label. This man -- meek and nervous in manner -- was attacked (subtly, in a devil's-advocatey way) for certain post-colonial contradictions in his stance, for a certain low-level "hypocrisy" or inconsistency, for turning non-property into property, and for participating in the music industry's obsessive "archive fever". The poor man became a symbol of everything we hate about our own system!
Now, I was one of the subtle attackers, and I can only say we did it because we thought the conversation would be boring without some element of conflict, and without the kind of "criticality" we've been taught is good, or at least good form. But the other night at Vacant the dynamic between the panelists was completely different. There was indeed something "vacant" about the conversation, but also something kind, even tender. Two women photographers were questioned by a male photographer, Masafumi Sanai. I was struck by the casually caressing way Sanai asked his questions and the tenderness with which he interjected his "yes I am listening, oh, that's interesting" noises. I'm sure linguists have a name for these sounds -- they're much more important in Japan than in the West, where you'd just tend to listen silently (possibly critically) then respond. Here you interject "uh... oh... ah... so..." syllables in a rhythm and a tone which, to me, makes the conversation sound so empathetic that it's almost like a minor act of lovemaking.
So while Sanai coaxed his guests permissively, caressingly with these rhythmic interjections, the women photographers themselves had a similar relationship with the audience: one, essentially, of coquetry; of casual, relaxed, intimate flirtation. The BBC's Hard Talk -- conversational fisticuffs, or a theatrical approximation of it -- this very much was not. It was more like a very, very light form of group sex. It rode on a clear empathy between clearly-differentiated men and women; the gender element was much more structurally central than it would ever be allowed to be in the West, where the questioner would (in the name of enlightened gender politics) be doing his best to relate to the women "as if they were men" (and of course this careful "non-misogyny" is precisely where I think the West carelessly encodes its misogyny).
Wearing my "Western eyes" I'm perpetually shocked by the sexy shortness of skirt and bareness of leg I see on Tokyo public transport, because of course through Western eyes this betokens a "sexualisation" which will surely lead young women "duped by a male-dominated society" into dangerous situations where they'll be taken advantage of, abused, even raped (though of course associating skirt length too explicitly with rape becomes a reactionary argument). We Westerners extrapolate from short skirts out into a whole series of awkward or dangerous scenarios played out in a low-empathy, low-trust, Western-style environment, a Resident Evil sort of environment where you never know what alienated person or flesh-eating zombie you're going to meet next. But these projections don't match the Japanese context, a situation of almost-twee security, cleanliness, low crime, low-to-no anomie, and familial tenderness between strangers (with occasional disturbing gropings into the territory of incest).
On my travels I've been taking pictures (or sound recordings) of representations of authority figures, and without exception they're ludicrously cute and empathetic. Policemen and construction workers on warning signs look like cute children, they bow and smile and intervene with friendliness. Even when they frown they look like pouty, sulky children. Now, as a British person I'm used to a certain idea of a construction worker, or white van man; he will, I know, leer openly at women who pass his site, make loud judgmental comments about me because I look weird or effeminate, and probably not hold back long if I'm crossing the road in front of his vehicle. But in Japan not only is the illustrated construction worker solicitous and tender in the signs that warn me that work is going on, the real thing is just as respectful, ushering me past with a bow and a shining guidance wand. I actually want to weep with gratitude, because my Western training has led me to expect vitriol, vague menace, and imputations against my masculinity from security staff, police, and construction workers.
There's an extraordinary infantilisation or feminisation of the figures of construction, logistics and policing. A white van (or, more likely, a tiny white truck) rushes past, and certainly a man is driving. But when he signals left, a female voice emits from the truck asking us, tenderly, to take care. Escalators, trains and elevators too come equipped with female voices, solicitous authority figures, and soon the entire city seems to be an automated female authority figure, robotic, gentle and maternal. It's not too far-fetched, I think, to connect this to suggestions that Japan was once a matriarchy. Certainly, the whole society seems to have a mother complex, and a diffuse feminine atmosphere of tenderness mixed with a certain nannying authoritarianism pervades the land.
Yesterday I went with friends to see a studio theatre version of Shuji Terayama's autobiographical 1974 film Den'en ni Shisu. We, the audience, were treated -- kindly but firmly -- like children as we were "boarded" into the tiny Shimokitazawa theatre. We were called up the narrow steps by ticket number, then ushered through into the theatre, where a belted, braced, flat-capped actress on the stage shouted affable instructions and ushers made sure we found seats. To be "mothered" in this way is odd -- the female authority figure is a collective mother, not one you have a personal connection to -- and yet becomes more and more familiar when you're in Japan. Possibly Japanese -- herded around by this primal mother the whole time, treated like children, indulged and spoiled, suckling from the social oppai -- become mollycoddled milksops, the most idiotically sheltered consumer society ever known to man. But possibly it's also massively wise, the secret of their social success, and a huge saving of psychic energy. Why be manly? Why be individualistic? Why struggle, why fight, why criticize? Any revolution here would have to be a revolution against the ambient tenderness of this great primal social mother, but revolution against mother is not in the nature of mammals. We need the milk.
We began Saturday back at the No Man's Land show at the French Embassy, because Hisae hadn't seen it, and a whole new wing of student work had opened up since I saw the show on Thursday.
Then we walked in sunshine over the Hiroo hill to gm ten gallery at Azabu Juban, where Chiako Kudo and Mao Yamazaki were waiting to talk us through an event we're planning to hold there on December 22nd. This is a new gallery (it only opened in October) related to the operations of Osaka designers Graf, known for their furniture and playful constructions for Yoshitomo Nara shows worldwide. Mao runs the music side (his label, Akichi Records, releases Oorutaichi) and Chiako the art side.
I've been talking with friends about where to play a casual free live show while I'm in Tokyo, and the consensus has been that gm ten is the ideal spot. On December 20th their new art show -- featuring drawings by manga veteran Eico Hanamura -- will open, and on December 22nd at 20.30 I'll play a 45-minute Momus set in the gallery, hopefully joined by a special guest or two.
There's a map of gm ten's location -- right next to Azabu Juban subway station -- here and, as I said, the show is free.
After the meeting with Chiako and Mao, Hisae and I headed (past the impressive Christmas... well, digits at Roppongi Hills) down to Ura-Harajuku to catch a panel talk at Vacant (catered vege-stylee by Yoyo!) featuring photographers Masafumi Sanai (Mr A Girl Like You himself) and Ume Kayo (her again!).
I had a wee thrill on the way to Vacant when I popped into Tokyo Bopper. Seeing charisma shop assistant Yama-Sama in the flesh for the first time really felt like seeing a pop star, and I had to hold back a manly squeal of excitement as I made a quick circle of the store and left (we were late).
After the talk at Vacant I met TABbers Cameron and Darryl again, then German photographer Sebastian Mayer and Vicente Gutierrez, who writes for Lucas Badtke Berkow's magazines Paper Sky (recently restyled) and Plants Plus, a sort of web extension of the excellent-but-defunct Planted magazine. Here are Lucas and Ito Seiko talking about their plans for the plants site:
I must say, I like the business goal of "widening the horizons of plants" by leveraging the green life forms' brand into previously-untried media, like a plants TV network and a plants music festival. Lucas thinks big; plants, it's time to raise your game!
Believe it or not, "uses of polished concrete in Japan" is a topic I've been planning to blog about for some time. And now I have the perfect excuse to unleash the comment torrent this topic will undoubtedly provoke ("How dare you suggest that wet-look concrete is a mere compensatory tactic?"). Yesterday, buffeted by a fierce low pressure system, Hisae and I erected umbrellas and headed down to Nadiff a/p/a/r/t.
There I found an area of polished concrete so miraculously shiny that I genuinely thought the rain was leaking in through the window, and tried to splash it with my shoe like a puddle. But let's take a step back, before this text gets too exciting.
Nadiff, to recap, is short for New Art Diffusion. It's an offshoot from Saison Culture; the bookstore, record store, gallery and cafe was started by the people who used to run the Libro bookstore in the Ikebukoro branch of Parco. For the longest time it was in a funky part of Aoyama, near the Maisen tonkatsu restaurant. Then in 2008 it moved to a purpose-built structure on an obscure alley off a riverside footpath in Ebisu.
If it weren't for prominent signs on the lampposts, nobody would find the new incarnation of Nadiff. And that would be a pity, because it's a jewel, an excellent repository of art books and magazines, with two galleries and a bar attached. The only thing that's gone is the record section, boiled down to a single table featuring CDs released by Raster Noton, Casten Nicolai's label. Nadiff has, in timely fashion, got out of CD retail.
But now comes the exciting part of my tale. Nadiff may have got out of music, but it's very much got into shiny polished concrete. The ground-level store's floors boast a fascinating variety of surface sheens. You need to read Schemata Architecture Office's account to discover how haphazardly these textures were arrived at:
"The existing floor was uneven from inaccurate construction," writes Schemata architect Jo Nagasaka, "so we poured epoxy mixed with pine ash on the floor to create a flat surface. The transparent black liquid made different shades of black, following the uneven surface on the floor. It looked like gradation of color on a gradually shoaling beach."
It actually looks, on a rainy day, as if even more inaccurate construction has let the elements seep in and cover the whole surface of the floor with a couple of millimeters of water. It's very hard to imagine such construction imperfections happening in Japan when you consider the care with which such things are done...
...but taking construction imperfections and making a conversation piece of them by subtly drawing attention to them is a Japanese tradition too; it's called wabi sabi.
It's hardly going to be headline-grabbing news for readers of this blog that I love Tokyo more than any other place on the planet. Re-immersing myself in this city gives me a chance to count the ways and the whys, though.
In the brief time I've been here I've done a ton of stuff. I went to Vege Shokudo in Koenji to eat old friend Yoyo's excellent vegetable curry, and found a posse of Tokyo Art Beat writers assembled there, including Cameron McKean and Darryl Jingwen Wee.
After the meal Yoyo took me out onto the narrow alley to meet the Shiroto No Ran storekeepers, including Hajime Matsumoto, who gave a talk about the collective in Berlin in October.
The man in the red-framed glasses below (he remakes secondhand clothes by stitching on playful motifs borrowed from cigarette packets, combini uniforms, and so on, a bit like Andrea Crews in Paris) then guided us to the legendary Asoko clubhouse, up a side-street. Nobody was there, but it was a thrill to locate it.
The next day I had lunch with Yukiko Sawabe, whose work I wrote about recently on my Art-It blog. We went to organic food basement Crayon House, then dropped into Gallery 360 (showing Yoko Ono's pistol-cracked glass plates) and Utrecht reading room, which is a pleasingly understated but immaculately-curated gallery and art bookshop on Omote Sando.
Then, taking in the new Nezu Museum and Junko Koshino's imperious building overlooking the Azabu expressway, we headed to the French Embassy in Hiroo, which has a really great show on called No Man's Land, a sort of art school degree show in which French and Japanese artists have been given individual rooms in a warren-like, slightly dilapidated building to make over as they see fit. It was nice to see a Love and Hate Bento Box video in one featuring Roger McDonald, and a painting by Audrey Fondecave featuring Mai Ueda and Cyril Duval as Holbein's Ambassadors in another.
But if I love Tokyo it's the surrounding context -- the thing producing events and encounters like these -- that deserves the credit. You really only sense something as abstract as a context interstitially, in slipping glimpses as you scurry from appointment to appointment. And yet these glimpses contain the magic that fuels the city, and your love for it.
So here's a paragraph of those glimpses, so frail, so fragmentary and yet so forceful. The tiling in the Citibank lobby on Aoyama Dori. The wooden mailboxes outside Utrecht. A transparently delicate schoolgirl reading a book on the stairs at Ebisu subway station. The 5 o'clock music transforming Meguro into Prospero's island (Shakespeare did travel to Japan; one day I'll make a film about it). The sense of complete safety; I can wear the most ridiculous clothes without fear of embarrassment or assault. Never having to worry about prying hands near my wallet, even in the densest crowd. A sense of being, if not in the future, at least in a parallel world where people are quite a bit more refined, well-mannered and intelligent than I'm used to. A pervading calm inhibition. The mechanical tenderness of soothing lift music. The women, their manner, their faces, their legs, their hair.
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"He came back from Japan looking different, somehow..." I suppose I've always been fascinated by watching someone -- a pop star who's moved up to the international level of success, or a friend who's moved to another country -- being visibly changed by the encounter. It might be someone British and working class who becomes a musician and starts traveling the world, and presently you notice exotic influences rubbing off on them in the way they dress, and the sound of their music. John Lydon discovers Jamaica!
The jacket I'm wearing in the photo above comes from 
Do you want flavours to go global, or one global flavour to go everywhere? Globalisation is clearly a sword with two edges; it has the flattening, monocultural capacity to make everywhere on earth look like exactly the same place, but also the amazing capacity to spread far and wide gloriously odd specificities it took cultures centuries to arrive at. Through tourism and other forms of cultural exchange, globalisation can also make local cultures think more clearly about the value of their own specific differences (actually seeing them as "differences" rather than "errors" is already a huge step).
Alin then fine-tuned a spindly-racy blue bike he's letting me borrow, and we made a trip to the local bike shop to refurbish Antonin's milk-white racer. It was nearly 8pm on a Sunday evening, but the bike shops in Tokyo were all still open -- something that would be unheard of in Berlin.
Nakako Hayashi is the editor of 
There was a very different experience waiting for us at the studio of a very different photographer, Meisa Fujishiro, yesterday. Fujishiro is a girly photographer known for his fast, loose, appetising gravure shots of girls, and books like Milky Hips (collections of women showing their bottoms in various locations). Just before vacating his Aoyama studio, Fujishiro has plastered the walls with snapshots and furnished the room with comfy chairs, tables laden with gravure books of pretty girls, and Michael Jackson's greatest hits pumping out of the stereo.
My analysis of bukkake inevitably raised Shinto's focus on seed -- and agrarian fertility in general -- as a framing device. Using that same frame, what does the rise of "boyish gal" porn tell us about the Japanese sexual psyche in late 2009? Is it a gay development, or a feminist one, or some kind of softcore misogyny, or part of a semi-hikikomori fear of the otherness of the other sex?
[Date] 2009.12.22(Tue) Open 20:30 / Start 21:00
We began Saturday back at the 
