A .pdf file of the English language version of the article is here, and the Japanese language version is here.

After lunch, we had a panel on “Radical Visual Culture in 1960s Japan” with Jonathan Hall (Pomona College) situating Okabe Michio’s remarkable 1968 film Crazy Love in dialogue with Susan Sontag’s writings on camp, William Marotti (UCLA) on the significance of early 1960s avant garde musical performances by the Group Ongaku, and Miryam Sas (University of California-Berkeley) on a variety of experimental animated films from the period.

Our last panel covered “Music in Film,” with Daniel Johnson (University of Chicago graduate student) looking at changing modes for representing romance/sex and sentiment/irony in Nikkatsu action films, Michael Raine (University of Chicago) discussing how we might rethink the practices of reading that 1960s popular films seem to suggest as their proper modes of use, and Junko Yamazaki (University of Chicago graduate student) on the use of avant garde musical forms in the film soundtracks composed by Mayuzumi Toshiro.

The conference ended with a screening of the remarkable 1964 Toho musical, Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru (You too can get ahead!, dir. Sugawa Eizo), a marvelous film that brings together many of the themes we had been talking about over the course of the conference. It was a stimulating, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting two days, and I’m grateful to all of the participants and to all of my colleagues for making it possible.

Here’s a trailer for Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru:

The conference will also feature special appearances by musicians who were key figures in the 1960s Japan rock scene, including Alan Merrill, an American singer/songwriter who was a member of the Group Sounds band The Lead, then a solo performer signed by the influential Watanabe Pro management agency, and subsequently the leader of the pioneering glam rock outfit Vodka Collins. (After leaving Japan in 1973, Merrill founded The Arrows, a band that had several hits in the UK, including the original version of “I Love Rock and Roll,” a Merrill composition later recorded by Joan Jett and many others).

Three original members of the legendary Group Sounds band The Golden Cups will also appear at the event — lead guitarist Eddie Ban, bassist Louise Louis Kabe, and drummer/singer Mamoru Manu — and the conference will include a screening of The Golden Cups: One More Time, an acclaimed 2004 documentary about the band.

All events are free and open to the public, but RSVP is required for the Friday evening sessions featuring Merrill and The Golden Cups. The RSVP link and a full conference schedule are available on line at:

http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/japanatchicago/

The event is the eighth in the annual Japan@Chicago conference series and is sponsored by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies. Persons who may need assistance to participate should call 773-702-2715. For additional information, please contact Sarah Arehart, Outreach Coordinator for the Center for East Asian Studies (sarehart@uchicago.edu).

[Updated May 13: We have added the RSVP system for the Friday night sessions mentioned above because we anticipate a large demand for the limited number of seats available]

The state of the newspaper industry in Japan isn’t quite so grim as in America, but the numbers are still tumbling. The hard-right Sankei newspaper is taking the biggest hit, report Peter Alford and David McNeill in a very interesting article up this week at The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Daily circulation figures for Japan’s major newspapers still dwarf those in other countries.

Slowly, however, the gravity-defying circulations appear to be heading for earth. ABC statistics on the main morning-edition circulation for 2006 to 2009 show that every Japanese newspaper recorded a loss of sales, except the business-oriented Nikkei. In relative terms, the declines are tiny: the world’s best-selling newspaper, the conservative Yomiuri is down from 10,042,075 to 10,018,117; the liberal-left Asahi from 8,093,885 to 8,031,579; the liberal Mainichi has taken a more substantial hit, from just under 4 million to 3.8 million. The Nikkei is up slightly from 3,034,481 to 3,052,929. Perhaps more indicative, and worrying, for the industry is the sharp drop in advertising revenues: from one trillion yen in 2007 to an estimated 600 billion in 2009, a year in which online advertisements continued to grow.

Those same newspapers are reporting just now (so far Japanese-language only, but I’m sure the English papers will be carrying this in a few hours) that film director Kitano Takeshi has just been awarded France’s highest cultural honor. This all coincides with a film festival and art show in Paris featuring his works.

So I was delighted when Stew’s musical, Passing Strange, won him some much deserved attention, including a Tony Award for its 2008 Broadway engagement. I thought about flying out to New York to see the show during its two runs there, but never made it. I did snap up the original cast recording CD when it was issued and fell in love with many of the songs on it.

In the end, though, I never saw the show live. Last night, I got to see Spike Lee’s film version, which records the final Broadway performance at the Belasco Theater. I was prepared to like this film, needless to say. But I wasn’t fully prepared for how powerful the experience was. It had me in tears more than once–that is, when I wasn’t laughing or tapping my foot in time to the music.

It’s a Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-a-Young-Man narrative combined with an electrifying rock show: Stew, his longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, and band are on stage the whole time, frequently interacting with the actors. The cast is astonishingly good. Many of the players take up multiple roles during the course of the evening, and it is sheer pleasure to watch them inhabit the bodies of radically different sorts of characters. Through it all, Stew serves as the avuncular narrator, stepping up to centerstage whenever the need arises for a rock-and-roll explosion. Spike Lee’s direction is lean but creative: he even gets a cast member to carry a video camera on stage to film one sequence (watch the Special Features section on the DVD for more about this).

I can only guess how much more powerful the show must have been live. It’s difficult to imagine another cast ever taking it on, so probably this filmed version is the best I’ll get. I hate to set you up with excessive expectations that no movie could ever satisfy; undoubtedly, the best way to encounter this would be to stumble across it unexpectedly and be blown away. But I’d hate for anyone to miss this one: do yourself a favor and watch the thing. It’s a work of art, and to paraphrase Stew, life is full of mistakes, but art is where we go to correct them.

504 pieces in all, it took Sonia and me four days to complete. I love doing jigsaw puzzles over the holidays: it gives me this luxurious feeling of burning time, like a millionaire torching twenty-dollar bills to light his cigars.

But do I really have to go back to work tomorrow? I love teaching, but would another week of winter break really cripple the university? My biggest complaint about the quarter system (as opposed to the morally superior semester system) is the short winter break. Sigh.

In the meanwhile, the NY Times reports that even old decrepit types like myself can learn new tricks, if we approach our neurons and synapses from the proper angle. “Disorienting dilemma” is the trick, they tell us. That should be a snap, since I spend most of my time in that state these days anyhow.

Anime god Miyazaki Hayao has granted a rare interview, prior to the opening of his latest work, Ponyo, in the UK next month.

Finally, a ray of hope from Kichijoji, one of my favorite neighborhoods in Tokyo: a new campaign to save the neighborhood sento (public bath) by way of rock music. It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it, and you can get your back scrubbed at the same time. Brilliant!

(Image source)

I’ve learned this morning from this article in the Minneapolis Tribune that our neighborhood briefly played home to another famous figure: Amelia Earhart lived there in 1913-14. She played girls basketball at Central High School, less than a mile from the house where I grew up. I’ve always heard she was from Kansas, but her father worked for the railroads and apparently they moved around quite a bit.

Guess where they lived after they left St. Paul: Chicago, in fact Hyde Park. I see a pattern forming.

Last week, on his blog the great baseball writer Joe Posnanski coined a new word, “dumbley,” to describe a fact that everyone else seems to know, but that you have somehow managed to miss learning. His example: he’d met a well-educated man who’d never heard of Amelia Earhart.

Of course, the new movie based on her life premiered last month. Conclusion: Amelia Earhart is no longer missing. She can be found all over the Internet.

Then Sunday night we headed down to the Chicago International Film Festival to see Kanikosen, SABU’s new postmodern take on Kobayashi Takiji’s 1929 proletarian literature classic about workers on a brutal crab canning ship awakening to an awareness of their oppression and organizing a strike. SABU is best known for directing loosely organized black comedies that revolve around sight gags and a kind of dream logic, making him an odd choice for this adaptation.

It works pretty well in the first half, as the director appropriates the visual and slapstick mode of Chaplin’s Modern Times, but founders somewhat in the second half, when he has to carry the narrative forward to its resolution. I was hoping he would figure out a way to convey revolution via the surrealism of his best films, but instead he switches over to straightforward Hollywood mode: speeches about individuals needing to live their lives to the fullest, sentimental soundtrack music, and camerawork that stresses close ups on the stars’ faces. He almost redeems the film in the closing minutes, when the style again suddenly shifts: we go into slow motion, blurred camerawork and metal machine music on the soundtrack precisely at the point when the workers realize that the point is not individual heroism but rather mass action, whereupon they launch their second, presumably more effective strike. It’s as if SABU is deconstructing the preceding hour or so of his own film and vowing that, whatever the revolution might be, it won’t be successfully carried out according to mass culture forms of melodrama and bourgeois ideologies of self-reliance.

I’ll keep the reworking-the-classics theme going later this morning as I walk to work. I’ll be listening to the Raveonettes’ fine new CD, In and Out of Control, a creative updating of Phil Specter and other classic pop sounds from the early 1960s. They combine the sweetest melodies with the darkest lyrics: “Boys who rape should be destroyed,” for example, or “Last Dance” in which the language of teenage heartbreak at the sock hop is used to depict the final days of a junkie. Just as with Lubovitch and SABU, they demonstrate that there’s life yet to be found in the tired bones of the canon.

(UPDATE: As Roger Pulvers reports at Japan Focus, a musical by Inoue Hisashi based on the life of Kobayashi Takiji is now on stage in Tokyo.)

Because of my flight schedule, I could only stay for the first 24 hours of the BAJS conference. I still managed to catch a number of interesting papers and plenary lectures. I also had the chance to meet dozens of scholars from around the world who are doing interesting work.

Before heading to Sheffield, I took in the spectacular West End production of the musical Oliver!, as well as Pedro Aldomodovar’s terrific new film, Broken Embraces, which won’t open here in the States for a few more months. I also visited Denmark Street in London, a short block-long road lined with music shops that was immortalized in a 1970 Kinks’ song called (see if you can guess it!), “Denmark Street.”

All in all, it was a lively and fun 12 days in the UK. But I am very pleased to be back home, even knowing the mountain of work that is waiting for me in my office.