Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

So, has Green Day shoplifted a Kinks’ tune? Check out this comparison over at Crooks and Liars. Should Ray Davies be contacting his solictors?

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped in at the Art Institute of Chicago to take in “Beyond Golden Clouds: Japanese Screens from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum” (on display through September 27). It’s a nice collection of about thirty pieces, and one of the nicest things about it is that it treats screen painting as a living tradition, including a number of fascinating twentieth-century pieces. I was struck in particular by Yamakawa Shuho’s 1933 Relaxing in the Shade, a portrait of two moga (modern girls) relaxing at the beach. There is also a panel containing a dozen characteristically warped images of hens and roosters attributed to the always surreal Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800). Many of the works on display integrate calligraphy with visual image, sometimes breaking down the distinction between the two modes.

I also took in the Cy Twombly exhibit (on through October 11) in the museum’s new modern art wing. It includes a number of paintings that integrate written script, including meditations on a haiku by Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707), a poet who has long fascinated me.

Over at Japan Focus, there is a marvelous new translation (from German) of an article by Tawada Yoko, the poet, novelist and essayist who works between Japanese, German, and English. “The Letter as Literature’s Poetic and Political Body” is a thoughtful, imaginative meditation on the status of written script in this age of graphic novels, cell phones, and Internet. Even translations of classic literature are metamorphosing before our eyes, growing insect legs and acquiring hard paragraph breaks. Tawada writes,

The letters lie there like delicate, dangerous fish bones long after the reader has consumed and digested the contents of the text. The useless bones should probably be thrown away, but somehow they look significant. I stare at a letter on the page I’ve just read and wonder: what are these strange figures here before my eyes? Are they shadows or footprints? They gaze back at me wordlessly, as if they wanted me to remember something. It’s no longer the meaning of the text that’s at stake. The question, rather, is how to respond to the unsettling presence of the bodies of these letters.

I’m not sure what this has to do with writing and visual images, but last weekend in London Amy Winehouse made a guest appearance in concert with the grand old ska band The Specials. I’ll be in London for most of next week. I promise to keep my eyes peeled for any similar cameo appearances–and, for that matter, for any imaginative couplings of written script with visual iconry.

I’ve just learned from Jason Gray’s invaluable blog that Sabu, director of The Crab Cannery Ship (Kani kosen, 2009), Drive (2001) and MONDAY (1999), has just released a new short film. Commissioned by United Cinemas to create the work as part of the promotional campaign for the Japanese release of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Sabu has produced yet another kinetic black comedy. “Dash & Cash” includes no dialogue, just lots of action, with everything building up to a typically absurdist sight gag.

You can watch the five minute film here.

I’m a bit late on this, as it was announced back in May, but I’ve just learned that Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyozai no kenkyu（国文学・解釈と教材の研究）, the monthly magazine published since 1956 by Gakutosha, has suspended publication with the July issue. It was one of the key journals of Japanese literary studies, written primarily by scholars but aimed at a broader readership.

Like all things having to do with print culture and literature, readership was down significantly. Efforts in recent years to attract new readers with features on such trendy phenomena as cell-phone novels may have backfired, alienating the older core of readers who were interested in “pure literature.”

I published one article with them, in their March, 2006 special issue on Natsume Soseki. The journal’s disappearance gives me one less thing to look forward to the next time I visit a bookstore in Japan. The old culture is going out with a whimper, I’m afraid, and not much bang.

The first time it happened was shortly after we were married. Satoko and I had moved from Tokyo to Ithaca, New York, where I enrolled in the graduate program in Asian Literature. On her first visit to an American dentist, the doctor looked at Satoko’s teeth and ordered a whole range of procedures. That was fine, but then several years later, when we went back to Japan so I could conduct my dissertation research, she went to a Japanese dentist. That doctor took one look at her American dental work and ordered it all ripped out and replaced: it was substandard, he said, and used materials that were unsafe.

A year or two later we were back in the States and the same thing happened again. The American dentist pulled out all of the work done by his Japanese counterpart and replaced it. We realized, of course, that with dentistry, we needed to choose sides. We could go with American dentists, or we could go with Japanese dentists, but we couldn’t do both, unless we wanted to submit repeatedly to unnecessary and expensive dental work.

While we were in Japan that second time, we had a tuberculosis scare. Someone with whom we had indirect contact was suspected of having TB. It ultimately turned out to be a false alarm (the person in fact didn’t have the disease), but before we learned that, we followed Japanese public health protocol and received BCG vaccinations. In countries that have had widespread tuberculosis epidemics, BCG shots are used because they provide a certain degree of protection against TB. In countries without widespread TB, they don’t use BCG shots, because they are not 100% effective and because they make it hard to distinguish who has the disease. Recipients of the BCG shot will show a positive result when given a Mantoux test, even if they haven’t been exposed to TB.

All was well and fine until we returned to the U.S. and Walter enrolled in kindergarten. The Los Angeles public school system required a Mantoux test for his medical forms, and when he came back positive because of the BCG shot, they required that he take a year-long course of heavy duty antibiotics, even though his chest X-ray was clean and even after we explained about the BCG shot had received a couple of years earlier.

We again learned our lesson: you don’t want to get caught between conflicting public health systems. It seems now that the increasing number of Japanese pitchers coming to play professionally in the U.S. are learning the same hard lesson. According to this fascinating article at NPB Tracker, the different regimes for maintaining the health of a pitcher’s arm are increasingly coming into conflict.

In Japan, the idea is to build up strength. If a pitcher throws 200 pitches everyday during spring training, he will easily be able to handle 100 or more during each game. If he develops a sore arm mid-season, well, the answer is to work his way through it. At the annual Koshien high school tournament, for example, it’s not too uncommon to see a star pitcher throw 200 or even 300 pitches over the course of a couple days.

In the U.S., on the other hand, pitches are treated like a precious finite resource, to be hoarded up and doled out as sparingly as possible. 100 pitches a game is increasingly the standard limit, and any injury to the arm is treated with rest. Any manager who allows a young pitcher, in particular, to go much beyond a hundred pitches in a game can expect to be immediately subjected to charges of putting the team’s future at risk.

Japanese pitchers, accustomed to the more-is-better system of arm maintenance in Japan, come to the U.S. and find themselves confronted with a completely foreign system. Not surprisingly, given their training back home, they feel like they are not being allowed to take the proper steps to steel their pitching arms. This can lead to misunderstandings and clashes.

I think the truth is that one system works better for some players, the other system for others. What I’ve learned from personal experience, though, is that the worse possible situation is to try to satisfy the requirements of both systems. Chose one side and stick with it.

I returned to Chicago late last night from a quick trip up to Minnesota. While there, we celebrated my father’s 72nd birthday (you can spot one of his presents here), caught the English-dubbed version of the animated film Ponyo, and caught up with a few old friends. I also ducked in and out of a garage or two.

Minnesota garages can been cool: musty, full of mysterious objects, and on occasion musical. Back in the 1960s, it seems that every Twin Cities garage sprouted its own rock band, equipped with fuzz guitars, Farfisa organs, and long, long hair. The structure of the music industry back then was such that bands could still have regional hits, getting regular airplay on local top 40 radio stations and becoming neighborhood heroes. On the drive to Minnesota this past week, I brought along two recently acquired CD reissues of classic 1960s Minnesota garage rock:

One was The Stillroven, Cast Thy Burden Upon The Stillroven (Sundazed, 1996). The Stillroven were one of the best groups on the scene, Minnesota’s answer to Los Angeles’ Love—in fact, like Arthur Lee and company, Stillroven recorded “Hey Joe,” and they also covered Love’s “Signed D.C.” “Little Picture Playhouse,” a minor regional hit from 1967, is my favorite piece here: I can’t get the quaint, psychedelic piano riff out of my head.

The other was T.C. Atlantic, Best of T.C. Atlantic (Dionysus, 2002). T.C. Atlantic were another Twin Cities garage rock legend from the 1960s. I’ve known their “(20 Years Ago) In Speedy’s Kitchen,” a baroque pop ballad that became a local hit in Minnesota back in 1968, since I was a child. This reissue includes that, as well as a nice selection of their more typical fuzz-toned, psychedelic garage rock, including the semi-legendary rocker, “Faces.”

I’ve spent much of the last week going over the copy-edit for a book manuscript I’m editing. I should send it back to the publisher in the next day or so and thought I’d give you a teaser here.

The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies: Politics, Language, Textuality will be published early next year by the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications. The book surveys the rise of linguistics-based theories in Japanese literary studies over the past several decades. It includes translations of classic essays of Japanese literary criticism from the 1970s, as well as new scholarship reflecting on the “linguistic turn” by scholars from both Japan and North America.

Here’s the table of contents:

The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies: Politics, Language, Textuality, edited by Michael K. Bourdaghs (forthcoming from University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications)

“Introduction: Overthrowing the Emperor in Japanese Literary Studies” (Michael K. Bourdaghs)

Part One. Pieces of the Linguistic Turn: Translations

Chapter One “Flowers with a Very Human Name: One Kokugaku Scholar Pursues the Truth about the Mysterious Death of Yûgao” (Noguchi Takehiko, translated by Suzette A. Duncan)

Chapter Two “The Embodied Self” (Kamei Hideo, translated by Jennifer M. Lee)

Chapter Three “The Narrative Apparatus of Modern Literature: The Shifting ‘Standpoint’ of Early Meiji Writers” (Hirata Yumi, translated by Tess M. Orth)

Chapter Four “Introduction to the Discourse of the Modern Novel: ‘Time’ in the Novel and Literary Language” (Mitani Kuniaki, translated by Mamiko Suzuki)

Part Two. Theories and Politics of Language

Chapter Five “Kokugogaku versus Gengogaku: Language Process Theory
and Tokieda’s Construction of Saussure Sixty Years Later” (John Whitman)

Chapter Six “Theories of Language in the Field of Philosophy: Japan in the 1970s” (Kamei Hideo, translated by Jennifer Cullen)

Chapter Seven “Tactics of the Universal: ‘Language’ in Yoshimoto Takaaki” (Richi Sakakibara)

Chapter Eight “Narration and Revolution: An Invitation to the Writings of Kobayashi Takiji” (Norma Field)

Part Three. Rethinking Meiji Literature

Chapter Nine “The Age of the Prize Contest Novel” (Kôno Kensuke, translated by Christopher D. Scott)

Chapter Ten “The Politics of Canon Formation and Writing Style: A Linguistic Approach to Kajin no kigû” (Guohe Zheng)

Chapter Eleven “Elegance, Propriety, and Power in the ‘Modernization’ of Literary Language in Meiji Japan” (Joseph Essertier)

Chapter Twelve “The Voice of Sex and the Sex of Voice in Higuchi Ichiyô and Shimizu Shikin” (Leslie Winston)

We’re currently halfway through watching the comedy series Seigi no mikata「正義の味方」, originally broadcast in summer 2008 on the NTV network and only now reaching these shores via the feet-dragging providers at TV Japan.

Originally based on a manga, like so many television dramas in Japan these days, it’s not the sort of show I would necessarily choose to watch on my own. But it makes a terrific series to share with my thirteen-year-old. The heroine is a hapless middle-school girl who spends her days tormented by her devilish older sister, who everything else believes to be an angel of mercy. The other reward in viewing it is to see the always wonderful Shida Mirai in the lead role, for which she won Best Actress at the 58th Television Drama Academy Awards.

The official website for the series (Japanese language only) is here, and there’s a good English language introduction here. The series’ opening sequence can be watched here, complete with English subtitles.

No sweat (literally). You can catch the whole thing here in about 90 seconds, and you don’t even have to pee in a Porta-Potty.

Lollapalooza 2009 Time Lapse from Robert Hendricks on Vimeo.

While Tokyo gets hit with an earthquake a day, here in Chicago I find myself buried under a mountain (slagheap?) of copyediting, recommendation letter writing, etc. I’m trying to find a bit of time each day to work on the last unfinished chapter of my book manuscript on postwar popular music (the chapter on 1970s “New Music”), but it’s slow going.

Over at Japan Focus, R. Taggart Murphy has a fine new article on the current economic crisis and the changes it bodes for U.S., Japan, and China relations as Beijing replaces Tokyo as the primary purchaser of American debt. He writes that “a world in which the primary external support for the US dollar comes from China rather than Japan is going to be very different from that to which policy makers in Washington and Tokyo have become accustomed over the past half century.” It is a moment of truth for Japan, one potentially disastrous but also, Murphy argues, one that might provide the opportunity to rebuild its social contract on a more sustainable basis. In that vein, Murphy expresses hope for the upcoming election.

Meanwhile, this month on his “Ongaku no Tora-san” television show, Southern All Stars leader Kuwata Keisuku has revealed a hitherto unsuspected literary bent. He’s taking the classics of modern Japanese literature and transforming them into the lyrics for pop songs. Among the victims are Natsume Soseki’s Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), Kobayashi Takiji’s Kani Kosen (Cannery Boat), and the following medley, which includes Nakahara Chuya, Dazai Osamu, and Yosano Akiko.