Globalization in Japan

Graffiti --> Rakkugaki
Graffiti has been around since as long as humans have had something to stain their walls with. However, Japan wasn't brought into the worldwide community of self-expressive vandal art until the late 80s to early 90s, according to this interview with Kubota Kenji, curator of an art museum that held a city-wide graffiti exhibition in Mito in 2005. He says that graffiti came about 10 years after the initial import of hip-hop culture from America. Since then, it has shown up in every major city, with many local artists establishing names (pen names? can names?) for themselves.
About a year ago plus change, I bought a book about the Japanese graffiti scene from Kinokuniya in Seattle. It had a strong focus on local Tokyo artists and a ton and a half of photos. It was love at first sight! Eventually, I made it to Tokyo, and ran into some of the same tags. Ahh, finally seeing KRESS's glorious name, splashed across the wall in Shibuya...
Anyway, the Japanese graffiti scene has a special affinity for goofy, cartoony designs incorporating original characters and vibrant colors. Here's one on a storefront in Yonago (Tottori-ken) that makes an alien abduction look like a fun way to spend the evening.

Note the block letters spelling WAGAMAMA WORLD. Aside from it being a strange name, this style would have been completely at home in Washington, D.C. in the early-mid 1990s. Not so much the cancerous jellybeans and enthusiastic spoon demon.

DOOK DOOK DOOK TSSSS
At Osaka Castle, you can satisfy your appetite for feudal Japanese history, architecture, landscaping...

...and Coke. The samurai were not so lucky as us that they could have popped open a can and taken a load off on the bench here in one of the outer courtyards. kitss-KLAC! You can't escape from the Coca-Cola Beverage Company.

Traditional Japan

What year is it?

So we're putting on the matsuri (festival) last week, right? Yeah, me and my fellow townspeople were parading the local god around on the mikoshi (portable shrine), when my buddy Goemon says, "Hey, guys, what're all these loud boxy things that keep almost hitting us? And what the heck are we walking on, anyway? This isn't dirt." But Boss Kenichi, smooth operator as usual, just tells him not to worry about it and sends two guys to the front to keep the road clear.

The Japanese have been holding these (usually) small-scale local events for ages and ages. In fact, I couldn't even find an internet source that made a guess at how long they've been going on.

This particular one was being held in Hirakata. I haven't been able to find out about the history of this particular festival, but it didn't look like there was any particular theme, anyway, except maybe Everyone Wear White Shorts Kudasai.

So You Want To Kill Yourself

Looking for a way to inflict as much physical pain on yourself as possible, while being able to pass it off as an educational experience? You should try harvesting rice on a hot October afternoon, as I did last weekend outside of Nagoya.

My friend Yuka, who arranged for me to participate in the inekari, suggested that we would spend the day hacking at handfuls of rice stalks and bundling them into piles, much as rice farmers have been doing since the early days of agriculture. However, this turned out to be only a small part of the process. Most of the work was done by a boxy vehicle on tank treads with what looked like half of a cow catcher on the front. The vehicle couldn't get the corners of the field though, so for a short time, we were doing it old school, bent backs and all. Feeding the hand-cut stalks into the machine an armload at a time was probably scarier than anything our collective forefathers had done, though.

Also, regardless of what modern tools one takes with them to the field, the rice itself probably hasn't changed much over the years. Neither have the bugs or the sunburn, for that matter. Koume (rice on the stalk) puts out a LOT of dust. Its gets on your skin and itches. It gets in your lungs and burns. The sun puts out a LOT of radiation, too, apparently. And the bugs are hungry as ever. These things have been plaguing Taro the Farmer forever, and this past weekend was no exception.

The Japanese seem to keep the tradition alive in other ways, too - a significant number of Yuka's relatives came to the house, if not to work in the field, then to help obaa-chan in the garden or to make an enormous lunch for everyone. When Yuka's grandfather, uncle and I came in all covered in itchy dust and sweat, there were the aunts and cousins putting shrimp and veggies on top of heaping rice piles. (I hope this isn't coming across as MAN BASH FOOD, WOMAN COOK FOOD or anything.)

So while the experience as a whole was not the "ditch your tie and live off the land" experience I was hoping for, it wasn't a total bust. What I didn't learn about traditional methods of farming was more than compensated for by a chance to see the Japanese family dynamic at work.

Here's the angry tyrannosaurus of a machine, carving a path of destruction through the field.

When working around heavy machinery with sharp parts, as we were doing, it's generally not a good idea to worry about things that aren't vital to the survival of your extremities. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to get more than a couple photos of the process.

Traditional Japan Preview

This is a placeholder for the Traditional Japan entry. I am not posting a legit blog entry for this topic yet, as I am heading out to the Nagoya area this weekend to harvest rice, and I think that'd be a fantastic experience to write about for this entry. In the meantime, I guess I can write about how I ended up with this opportunity.

At my home university, UAlbany, I became friends with a Japanese foreign exchange student named Yuka. At some point, she mentioned that her grandparents ran a farm outside of Nagoya, and that if I ever needed a job, I could probably go work for them. Pondering the possibility of working on a farm in Japan led me to decide that I'd like to make a career out of it.
Before coming to Kansai Gaidai, I visited Yuka at her home in Nagoya. I jokingly brought up the possibility of taking over her grandparents' farm when they retired, to which she replied, "well, the rice harvest is in mid-October. You should come out and help us, and see if you like it."
So, this weekend, I'm bussing out to Nagoya, from which Yuka and I will make the trek out to... Actually, I have no idea where we're going.

Yuka says that her grandparents have someone harvest the field with a large piece of machinery (I assume it will be something along the lines of a combine) that misses certain spots whenever it turns around to do another row. Someone has to get those spots by hand and sickle, and probably bundle them up, as well. It'll take at least all weekend, but I'm only going to be at the farm on the 19th. (Bussing back to Kyoto Station the morning of the 20th. Hopefully I'll be back in time for class, Professor!)

There have been some interesting reactions from the Japanese people I've told about this impending adventure. My Spoken Japanese sensei says that more and more young people are considering becoming farmers because working at a desk, wearing a tie, and kissing up to someone twice as old as them is becoming a less attractive choice for an increasingly independent generation. On the other hand, most of the people in my age bracket say that agriculture is the last thing on their list of potential careers. Yuka said that she feels bad about the decline of the small-scale farming industry here, but that Japanese society's measure of success holds it in fairly low regard, and that she doesn't think she'll end up any more involved with her grandparents' business than she is now.

In any case, this will hopefully give me a taste of the nouka (farmer) lifestyle. Maybe I'll fall in love with it, maybe I'll decide it's not for me. Either way, it'll be good exercise and a good time.

Japanese Pop Culture

QR Codes

Image borrowed from http://www.kilian-nakamura.com/

Have you seen these little black and white patchwork squares? They store text and other data as a matrix! I try to remember to scan these every time I see them, and have found everything from coupons to ads to website links. If you can write it, you can make a QR code out of it. I bought a carton of apple tea from the campus kombin a few days ago, and on the side was one of these. I scanned the code and received a URL leading to the company's "Halloween Campaign" website. Last weekend, in Kyoto, I scanned one on a train and got 4 lines of indecipherable Japanese text with an extra helping of 15+ stroke kanji. After some perusing of my keitai's seemingly infinite features, I discovered that you can generate your own from both English and Japanese text, as well as with your contact information. Imagine printing 100 of these as stickers and putting them all over your hometown. The calls would just roll in! (Until the sanitation department tracks you down and makes you remove them.)

According to the website of the company that invented them, these have been around since 1994, but since QR decoding functions started appearing on keitai, their popularity has extended beyond the industrial uses for which they were intended.

Hemp, Hemp, Everywhere, But Not a Gram to Smoke?

If you've spent any time at all in the presence of 16 - 26 year old Japanese people, you've most likely encountered at least one clothing or accessory design incorporating the infamous pot leaf. In Western countries, not only is it instantly recognizable as marijuana, but we tend to immediately characterize the person displaying it as a marijuana user. It's not a terribly irrational conclusion to come to... In the West. Here in Japan, where being caught with possession of marijuana carries much higher consequences than in North America, people seem to have no qualms about sporting track jackets and rearview mirror ornaments emblazoned with the design.
However, as with all things, one must consider the issue from the Japanese side. According to my former sempai in Gifu Prefecture, the Japanese do not draw a connection between the image of the leaf and the illegal drug at all. "It's just a leaf, right? The stuff we would get arrested for comes in little green nuggets. It's not the same thing, is it?" In this country, the leaf is a symbol of stereotypical laid-back Jamaican attitudes... and apparently world peace, as well. But to us gaijin, this will continue to be a source of confusion as we try to reconcile the image of an otherwise tidy, professional college students with shirts screaming things like "420 SPECIAL GANJA PEACE."

People

One of the aspects of anthropology (sociology?) that I find most interesting is discovering the ways in which a mass of people attempting to accomplish the same goal will organize themselves, especially when it is done with no prior planning. I haven't seen much in the way of the spontaneous organization yet, but all around us there are signs of the Japanese's own special brand of unspoken rules and other means of making society run smoothly.



I'll give you one guess as to where these people on the ski lift are going....
Believe it or not, they're headed for the largest sand dunes in Japan. As you can see, the lift goes over the road, carrying the little obaa-chans and ojii-sans safely across while allowing the cars to continue down the hill at breakneck speeds. (God Bless the Inaka.) While this doesn't really fit into the "spontaneous organization" idea, I though it was a fantastic example of the degree to which the Japanese try to make big institutions such as major tourist attractions run like a well-oiled machine.
On a semi-related note, the terminus of this lift ended at the top of a large sandy bowl... Which the previously-mentioned senior citizens traversed with apparent ease.



This, on the other hand, is an example of the impromptu self-organization. On one of the raniest days we've had since the Japanese students started classes, the line at the closest bus stop went around the corner, down the street and around the next corner. Rather than trudge down the street for 10 or 15 minutes, these folks preferred to wait longer and take the drier route. Who started this line? Who decided it would go down this street, as opposed to down the sidewalk to the right? Who was the first to say, "Now the line will turn around this corner, instead of continuing down the street"? Whatever the means and motive, here are over 100 people waiting patiently for the bus to Hirakata Station.