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Category: Japan

Last of Japan. Or so I thought.

I’d decided to leave Japan after 10 weeks of research with what felt like no results. I was more confused than when I arrived.

Paul Weller was playing Tokyo so I treated myself with a gig before leaving. I’d arrived late hoping to buy a cheap ticket off a tout but there were no touts about just an orderly queue of people.

Growing up the UK my life had been a series of Jam, Style Council and Weller gigs. They were always as riotous as the audience was. I always felt a part of such crowds. It was interesting to see how Mr. Weller was going fit in here. The packed house was seated and silent as they waited for him.

As I blinked I missed his arrival. Suddenly there he was on stage. The full house remains well ordered and offered a controlled hand clap. No cheers not even a murmur from the audience. The atmosphere felt like a school concert with an amateur rock band on stage. Weller looked bemused but did his best and continued.

I was at the back of the Circle. And like my attempts over these last 10 weeks I felt desperately outside what was happening around me. I felt the same frustration in the concert hall that I felt at not getting inside Japan. I instruct my Japanese friend to follow me in an effort to get closer to the stage and thunder out of the Circle and down some stairs to the main hall. My friend is warning me that we do not have the right tickets, “fuck them”. I am angry at my failed attempts at getting inside Japan and want to at least enjoy this gig before I leave. It stirs great memories of growing up with Weller gigs as a kid.

I storm the main hall doors expecting a polite young Japanese ticket collector to stop me. Two ticket men demand tickets I thunder past them and run down the aisle followed by my friend, pushing more ticket collectors out of my way. I end up 6 feet from Weller at the front. Close up I wanted to feel the gig and enjoy it more. But close up I could sense Weller’s bemusement more than I could from back. Weller was doing his best to enjoy himself. Blasting through the set. The crowd would sway to the songs and clap between them. There was an eerie silence amongst the crowd that Weller found embarrassing. He would amuse himself by making jokes, knowing no-one was really understanding him.

“Just keep clapping a little longer while I change my guitar…”

Clap clap clap

Weller was struggling through his set like I had struggled through my research-time in Japan. No matter how hard he tried he never got closer to his audience they always kept themselves at arms length. Swaying through songs and clapping between them. I could really identify with him. This Weller concert was a monument to my time in Japan.

To amuse himself he would make more jokes with the audience who he didn’t understand and who didn’t understand him.

“It’s a great pleasure to play back in this hall in Nakano. I played here 26 years ago when I started out with the jam and …” he smiles knowing he is talking to himself. “It was a fucking nightmare then and it is now” he hammers into another song laughing to himself.

This concert was more personal than most and it felt like an epitaph to my time Japan. A grateful goodbye to 10 long weeks of alienation, confusion and disappointment. Weller kept looking round to his young band members and breaking into fits of laughter. I kept thinking ‘oh why does Japan make itself so alien’.

I remember an english teacher telling me when I first arrived. ‘The problem with the Japanese he said is that they always live up to their worst stereotypes.’

Weller returns to the stage for the encore. A Jam number, ‘Town Called Malice’… he cannot get the first line out for laughing; it’s a private joke with other band members who are also laughing. As he sings the first line the joke becomes clear to me but is missed on the thousands in the audience…

‘you better stop dreaming of the quite life because it’s the one you’ll never know…’

Weller can hardly sing for laughing now.

I leave remembering the good old days of growing-up with Weller gigs in the UK. I struggle to find what Japan means to me. 10 weeks in Japan had sort of destroyed my soul. I thought fuck Japan I will never come back I simply cannot relate to this place.

6 Weeks Later

I’m back in UK recovered and behaving as if Id never been to Japan. I am thinking of making a film in Africa then the phone goes, it’s the BBC they love the last idea I sent about Japan and would love me to make it. Furthermore they are offering the best part of 200k to do so. The Japanese network NHK will match that with a further 100k.

I’ve been raising money to make this film for the best part of 3 years … the money allows me to make a film the way I want with the luxury of a year in which to make it. This was always my dream.

The problem is now my dream has become my nightmare.

Bored Japanese housewives and their salarymen husbands

I was on the subway train tonight watching people sleep. There was a whole family crashed out in front of me, father, mother, son and daughter. An amazing sight. I had to photograph them. Around them were commuters who never batted an eye lid. I’d been out visiting English languages schools investigating a film about looking at bored Japanese housewives wanting to learn English.

I was sat thinking of a story told to me by a housewife who was explaining how house trained her husband wasn’t. she’d been ill and laid up in bed for a week and he was forced to help out. It was his first experience in the kitchen. He was making her an egg sandwich. When it arrived the toast was burnt and the egg frazzled. Her husband could not find the toaster so used the cooker fire to make the toast and did not realize that you need oil in the pan to fry an egg!

Another woman shook her head saying that she has to pour her husbands breakfast cereal for him each morning. The others sat around the table mumbling to themselves in agreement. “One day I make him continental breakfast the next Japanese breakfast with rice and soup…” another says that she was up at 5am to make her husband, who is a doctor, breakfast, she will have his evening ready meal when he returns at 11pm.

There is a great power balance that goes on between the housewives lifestyle and their salarymen husbands who are always blamed for not being around.

The women are accused of hanging around cafes with each other moaning about being bored… the husbands are accused of never being there, of always being tired.

In Japanese society the working day officialy finishes at 5.30, but no-one leaves until the boss leaves, the salarymen live in fear of what others salarymen may think. What is this all about? George Orwell’s 1984 Japan style…

Many single women in Japan also think that the housewives have it easy compared to their husbands who must work such long hours with so much traveling. It reminded me of my factory working days when I left school at 16 and worked in an engineering company. I remember discussing the very same subject with my work mates who were married with kids. They were tired, cold and covered in oil every day. All of them said given the choice they would swap their jobs to become house husbands. It would be interesting to measure their happiness levels with some of the Japanese. I’m sure they were relatively similar except that if unhappy the British wives could file for divorce.

Until recently divorce was not accepted here in Japan at all. Today it is becoming more popular, in fact very popular, although there is still a stigma attached to it.

After the English class finished one of the women tells me privately that none of the housewives are happy in their relationships. That marriage here is a duty; they are to look after the children and the house. “No-one said anything about happiness.” She told me many exist in marriages known here as ‘mask relationships’ which are sexless, loveless marriages. Often the husband has a mistress and the housewife knows but does not challenge him. I’d heard about housewives learning English with the sole intention of jumping in bed with the English teacher. A way of rebelling from their constrained life.

But life here in Japan is still very much dominated by the male, the man. I think women will have more rights in china before Japan. There is something so entrenched in the archaic way of thinking here that stops Japan moving forward and joining the modern world in its ‘way of thinking’.

Japan is ‘technologically’ the first world, but ‘mentally’ it is a third world nation. The years after the Second World War saw it race ahead and grow but with it came its feudal past still so evident in day to day Japanese life.

But things are changing slowly. Divorce is becoming more accepted here freeing women up from unhappy marriages. It is common amongst couples once their last child has finished university and amongst childless couples. It is also very popular for retired couples who never see their husbands for 30 years of marriage then they retire and stick to them like ‘wet leaves’. Retired housewives with ‘wet leaves’ wait for their husband’s pension to arrive then file for divorce. The husband is often shocked and spends the rest of his life wondering why his wife divorced him.

As the train pulls into my station I wonder about the family sat in front of me. They are still asleep. The woman sits on her own asleep, her head slumped ungraciously forward with the daughter on her knee and the father slumped with his son’s head on his knee. At first I thought they were Chinese or Korean immigrants but I was assured by a friend that they are Japanese; a great image of modern Japan.

In a funny way they all look equal in sleep.

The same friend assured me that they will wake automatically at their station, it could be one or two more hours yet but they will wake up. The Japanese always know when it is their stop.

Waiting For The Red Man

If Iraq was a pressure cooker waiting to explode then Japan is a pot of rice silently simmering away. Rarely does it over boil, life just simmers away.

Waiting for the red man to change to green can often seem like an eternity at pedestrian crossings in Japan. I am standing with an exhausted businessman whose eyes keep opening and closing. I look around the neon lights of Shinjuku and my mind drifts…

In this relative freedom I think of friends like Jill Carol kidnapped in Iraq, no news for months. I often think of her life now and mine here, relative luxury in comparison. Then I feel lucky. I get frustrated waiting for so long at these lights, they take forever. Sometimes I think about crossing on the red man…

I know that as a `gaijin` (foreigner) I can get away with it, but I don’t want to stand out. Japan has that effect on even me now. It is not a fear from the authorities punishing me more from the people around me. What will they think, or say.

It reminds me of Saddam`s Iraq, except there the fear was different.

But fear brings social order which brings safety as well. And I feel incredibly safe here. I remember feeling as safe in Saddam’s Iraq. No one would ever touch me. The only time they did was when I was wandering through a market without my government minders, I’d walked ahead alone. Suddenly I was surrounded by a threatening gang who wanted to know who I was and what I was doing. My minders were quick on the scene, as soon as the gang knew I was `authorized` they were friendly. I found it touching that people care for their country and their land.

A couple of years later a friend did a crazy walk into Saddam’s Iraq following an ancient trail from Istanbul to Baghdad to Syria. He walked over the border from Turkey into Iraq. Rural Iraqi’s never knew who he was, kept thinking he was an American pilot shot down. This was during relative peace in the years between the attacks on Iraq. Rural Iraqi’s would run up and attack him. He had caught a bad disease and was on deaths doorstep. He was saved by other Iraqi’s who became his friends. They housed him, fed him and saved his life. He wrote to me the other day saying the very same people who he is still friends with had been arrested for insurgent attacks against the American occupiers. Funny, when I think of insurgents I think of the time I was stopped in the market and the time my friend was stopped walking into Iraq ~ the same people gave my friend a place to stay and saved his life.

I’m itching to cross the road but still the little man is red. The crowd builds and patiently, obediently waits and waits… as if a race is to begin. The man next to me can hardly stay awake. I look at the faces of people around and wonder what they are thinking. I wonder sometimes if they are thinking. If they have the time to think. They are all dressed in the uniform black suits shirts and ties marching around the streets on aimless missions of work, following duties so dutiful and orderly like economic soldiers of work.

15 years after the bubble burst there is a wariness amongst the Japanese. This is a country finally coming out of recession, but with scares. I met a businessman the other day, who was nearly made homeless when the bubble burst. He seems jaded today. I visited his own company who make a special brand of sake. He was showing me around his offices where hundreds of people work. He is faced with streamlining his company and has to loose 100 employees by the end of March. It reminds me of what happened in Britain in the 1980`s. full time jobs are being replaced by part time jobs in Japan.

A bell chimes in the office; it is like a chime from an old grandfather clock. The businessman tells me it is the end of the day ~ but no one is leaving. I ask him why. He laughs looking into the vast office. “They are scared, peer pressure… they don’t want to be the first one to leave… fearing what the others will say”. They all carrying on working waiting for the first one to leave. Is this why the Japanese work so many hours?

It is now nightfall at the pedestrian crossing, 10pm and businessmen are heading home. Have they all been waiting for the first one to leave? Like we are all waiting for the red man to change to green. The road clears, the crowd gets ready to cross.

It feels like it has taken forever. In my mind I have been to Iraq and back but what about the others. I look to the tired Japanese businessman standing next to me, the red man has changed to green but the businessman is fast asleep standing on his feet at the pedestrian crossing.

Biotic Food and the Unsung Hero

I was drinking with a Japanese friend, Mie in an Irish bar last night. I love watching the Japanese eat fish and chips and drink pints of Guinness. The eager young girls are on the look-out for Western guys, the Western guys on the look-out for Japanese girls. Mie had read my blog last week about the homeless salary men in San Ya district of Tokyo. It made her cry, it made her think of her life growing up in Japan and the many things she’d done against her will, in order to fit in.

I enjoy talking with both Mie and Mayumi (the production assistant). Both women are looking for their place in modern Japan – but as they change and grow as individuals – this rigid society is dragging its feet to follow them. There are technological advancements here each day, but cultural ones come slow. Modern Japan is still governed by tradition deeply rooted in the feudal past. But I don’t think Japan can really move ahead until women are accepted as equal. Something the fat old men in power find hard to accept, but things are changing. They can certainly down their pints in the Irish bar.

I said goodbye to Mie at Shinjuku station. I was starving and had forgotten to eat. Most restaurants close at 11pm in Tokyo. Crazy. You can drink until 5am but no food after 11! I head to the hotel, pushing my way trough crowds of people avoiding the temptation of entering another bar. Then I get a call from Mayumi the production assistant, she is in tears about the production. Some of the other European film makers do not want to work with her company and she feels responsible. I tell her not to worry and that she is wonderful. She works so hard and does her best. Japan is so demanding in so many ways that we in the West do not appreciate. I’m beginning to sense the pressures of living here now.

For a moment I sense I’m finally ‘becoming Japanese’.

Then a woman jumps out of a bar and beckons me inside. I signal to the woman to wait. Mayumi is still crying on the phone. The woman is waving, I’m smiling, Mayumi crying. I know I should just go home, but now I have stopped, I’m looking at the bar. I’m consoling Mayumi on the phone. She starts to feel better. I invite her to join me for a drink. She tells me she cannot. She is staying with her friend tonight who she is worried about. “She been suicidal and I need to watch her”. God damn it, another example of this high pressured existence. In a country with over 30,000 suicides last year, I guess you have to be careful.

Ten minutes later I’m ‘Lost in my own Translation’ in a bar with Bourbon in one hand and my head in the other.

The next day I’m woken by the rain. Outside I see a homeless man sitting on the pavement; he has chopsticks in one hand and a dirty plastic bag of food below. He is looking mystified at the policeman who stands above him. In a forceful but polite way the policeman is trying to move the man on. I walk past, hurriedly, hungry for my lunch, and into a plush micro biotic cafe. £6 sees me right with a ‘raw lunch’ of I don’t know what. But it felt healthy. As I leave I look into the beauty salon opposite. I catch a glimpse of a couple of girls partially visible through a half opened door. I stop and watch them for a moment. A seductive moment created by the place, time, partial visibility, or maybe just the micro biotic food. For a moment I cannot move.

I love to stare in Japan, just like the Japanese do when they are abroad.

Then I glide out through the luxury automated doors. They are as clean as the pavement outside and as the buildings around. As clean and perfect as the skin on the face of the woman who works at the micro biotic restaurant. She looks so perfect and happy she makes me feel happy even when I’m sad. Or maybe that’s the micro biotic food. I don’t know.

But today is Sunday, I feel aimless and it is raining.

I pull out my 100 Yen umbrella and join a sea of 100 Yen umbrellas that fill the pavement. I see a homeless man cowering under his 100 Yen umbrella. I notice a Chanel carrier bag over his shoulder. Without thinking I follow him, we are both hiding under our umbrellas. He stops at rubbish bins to look through them. Then he continues. Today my life in Japan feels as aimless as his. What is remarkable is he doesn’t realize he is the hippest homeless man in Japan today. I take a couple of secret photos, not meaning to steal from him, or to invade his privacy.

Because for me he is the unsung hero of my film today and I always want to remember him.

Toilets of the 21st Century

I refused to write about the heated toilet seats and the bottom sprayer because it was too much of a Japanese cliché. The kind of Japanese story we always read about, some amazing piece technology that seems crazy to us and makes the Japanese look weird.

But that changed a couple of nights ago when I was out. I’m not sure where I was as we were having a drink or two, but in the course of the evening I went for a pee. I don’t look twice at the heated toilet seat anymore. All the buttons for back spray and front spray, bidet etc, wires to the seat to keep it warm, they no longer amaze me. I just try not to miss the bowl fearing some electrical shock in a nasty place. But this time I lift the seat preparing an accurate aim to see a blue neon light illuminating the bowl. It is incredible! I knew I had to write about it just to remember it. Shame I never had my camera to photograph it – a real piece of toilet history.

I’ve been seriously tempted to try the back shower spray again. It’s just that the last time I tried it I got a face wash by mistake. After finishing, I decided to have a go and touch a button to the side of the seat. I heard a motor bringing forward the sprayer. It is a nerve racking moment before a fierce force of water accurately hits the spot. I found myself screaming then giggling then screaming again before leaping off the toilet and getting a face wash from the spray. Since then I have shy’d away from the bum spray but each day I look at the sophisticated piece of technology lying dormant in my bathroom. I know I pay more to have this marvel in my room which makes me even more intent on trying it again.

It is only matter of time before I confront my fear of technology and start having a regular bum spray on the Japanese toilet of the 21st century.