Changing Impressions of Japan

When I was 13 or 14, my mother went through one of those artsy-fartsy fads where people try to get into scrapbooking while their kids are too young or illustration while their kids are too old. My Mom took a wrong turn and ended up in ukiyo-e. One day, she showed me a low-res color Xerox of a woodblock print she'd found on the Internet. It was a night scene of what must have been Old Edo; an empty street, multicolored paper windows lit softly from the inside, old wood-framed buildings advertising warmth enough for you to imagine, but not enough to welcome you in. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Laundry accumulated, my folks split, and Mom's masterpieces via Hewlett-Packard were buried under time and lost, but I never forgot that painting. Gundam, ninja warfare, and Kurosawa held my interest long enough to get me through high school and into the East Asian Department at UAlbany, but I never fell out of love with ukiyo-e and that lonely beauty.

Though I'd like to say that I came to Japan with my head straight, ready to buckle down and send my Nihongo abilities through the roof, the truth is that I wanted to find that aesthetic somewhere and get lost in it. I wanted to walk down that empty street and shiver as I watched the colored lights glow through the walls.

Since coming to Japan, I have caught glimpses of the "floating world" as Hiroshige and his fellows saw it.


Full moon and paper lantern, Daikakuji, Kyoto.

But only glimpses. Mirages, really.


Near the south gate of Kansai Gaidai.

Though the floating world was paved over and modernized long before I was born, I cannot help hoping that I have not felt the last of that same stillness.
That solitude of mind among multitudes.
That nostalgia for that which still is.

I hope yet to see that soft glow behind paper. . .

Arts and Entertainment in Japan

Gundam Generation(s)
This is what the shelves of Japanese hobby shops in the 1980s looked like:

(image is recent, products are vintage. taken from here.)

In 2008, this is part of Big Plant 5's model kit section:

Bandai has been producing plastic model kits for the Gundam franchise since 1980. As manufacturing technology improved, the company was able to make kits easier and easier to assemble. The varieties that have been released for the past decade or so don't require any glue at all - the parts are snapped off a frame and into each other. Most are multicolored, requiring no paint to look like their counterparts in Gundam anime and manga.
One of the things I like about the ganpura series (aside from it being Gundam and therefore awesome) is that since it's been around for nearly 30 years, its appeal spans two or three generations of Gundam fans - little Kenji can sit at the kitchen table and snap together his 1/144 scale "Exia" (from the most recent series, Gundam 00) while otoo-san sticks decals on his 1/100 scale RX-78 (the 1979 original) and looks on proudly.

Buy, Use, Dispose

Given the content, it's possible this manga is by the side of the road because someone didn't want their girlfriend finding it in their car, but a more likely scenario is that its previous owner simply finished it and threw it away.
Popular weekly manga publications such as Shonen Jump and Hyper Corocoro print millions of issues per week and sell them for 230 to 250 yen apiece each Monday. Seeing as the volumes are pretty thick for a weekly, attempting to hoard more than a few months' worth of issues would probably take up a lot of precious space in the average Japanese household; on Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings, you can find trash bins (and sometimes train cars) stuffed with issues. You'd think it would be good news for the avid reader who doesn't want to pay for it, but I have yet to see someone pull a used copy out of the can.
Or off the side of the road.
Blech!