Finding the Freaks

Over the years, I've developed pretty sophisticated freak radar.  After six months in Tokyo, slowly circling and infiltrating and honing in, I finally struck real gold last night.

This is an unfortunately pretty crummy cel-phone picture of Zool.Gel, aka Keito Suzuki (Japanese blog), playing at Nantoka Bar, an anarchist spot in Koenji I'm going to write more about soon.  That is a fountain of red goop descending from a shelf.  It dripped and plopped throughout his intense set, which included earphone-mics shoved into jars of goop, lots of looping effects, and most of all, this amazing hand-blown glass water-flute that produced some tremendously weird bird-like sounds.

As good as the show was, though, the weirdest part was the connection - Keito is part of the band Topping Bottoms, which put out some tapes on the Not Not Fun label.  That's the same label that put out a fair amount of stuff from Racoo-oo-oon and some other Iowa-ish bands that I wrote about for Signal to Noise last year.

I feel like I've finally found My People - especially since Zool.Gel also makes weird hip hop beats.

Notes from the Field: Three Studios: Hip Hop Life

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Liyoon - Japanese Killer Whale

I can't believe I haven't heard about this already.  Apparently released about five months ago, this is in some ways a predictable Japanese "national pride" perspective on the discussion over whaling/dolphin hunts that's still boiling well after the release of The Cove.  But there are several weird/interesting twists, some of which will be obvious immediately:



It makes a lot of sense that this is in English, since the essential message is about the hypocrisy and even racism of the Western anti-whaling position.  The most convincing point made, as far as I'm concerned, is that pigs, like dolphins, are pretty smart animals, but the West eats tons of them anyway (actually, so does Japan, but I think the point still stands).

The really interesting part, and a vital reminder of the vastly different Japanese political landscape, is that Liyoon is Zainichi - a Japanese-born Korean.  He used to belong to a group called KP, which stood for "Korean Pride."  From an American perspective, it's odd to think about an ethnic minority pushing such an overtly nationalist (or at the very least, patriotic) viewpoint, but the dominance of American influence in Japanese politics and culture changes the math radically.  At some moments it makes sense to identify as Zainichi against a Yamato ethnic mainstream, but at least as often someone like Liyoon is going to encounter threats to the "Japanese" side of his identity, and feel the need to rise to their defense.

That reactive/defensive stance seems omnipresent - in fact, it pretty much explains the whole whale situation.  Most Japanese don't actually eat whale meat, but many nonetheless support the hunt because it has a symbolic power even if they're not participating in it.  It represents their ability to defy the West, and specifically America (home of the Sea Shepard), at least in some relatively small way.  If that element of defiance wasn't important, it's pretty clear most Japanese, at the very least, wouldn't care about whale hunting one way or the other.

International Transport Volume 3 – Dirty Black Ships

“Tranquility now is just future anarchy unbirthed.”

International Transport Volume 3 - Dirty Black Ships (Temporary!)

In 1854, Japan learned the wrong lesson from America and the West.  There wasn’t any real choice – faced with guns, technology, and aggression, the alternatives were to either answer with more of the same, or to capitulate with the rest of Asia, South America, Africa, and Native America.  And so Japan modernized, from the top down, sending its greatest minds for immersion in Dutch Learning and its greatest spirits to the concert halls of Vienna to learn the even temper of the West.  This westernized elite had, arguably, even more power than those who inspired it, because in addition to wealth, they had unique access to a whole system of values – about individualism, freedom, and ambition – while Japan’s peasants continued to be fed the ideology of self-sacrifice.  They didn’t always buy it, the human spirit isn’t that easy to squash.  But enough of them did.

Today, things may finally be changing, in at least one way.  Japanese mainstream pop music is among the world’s shallowest, a wad of bubblegum shoved into the social eye of the truth, run by a mafia-esque elite machine which independent voices haven’t got much of a chance of penetrating.  But a bunch of artists and labels are working hard to change that – to get other voices out into the world, where maybe they can inspire some peasants.  This mix is a gift for all of them, inspiration from West to East, a mess of messages from the bottom to the top – from the workers to the kings, from the disgruntled to the complacent.  It's dirty but it's beautiful.  It's scary but it's seductive.  It's loud.

It’s something you get better at with practice.

Playlist after the jump.

Japan the Beats

Welcome to everyone finding my blog via my column at Tinymixtapes.  A couple posts of particular interest:

Japanese hip hop prehistory: Jagatara

The Sumo Tapes: Ganja, Rappers, and Big Fat Asses

You can also find a ton of good stuff just by following the "Japanese hip hop" tag, conveniently attached below.

For those headed the other direction, here is the most recent Japan the Beats at Tinymixtapes, about Origami, nostalgia, and indie-farm fashion.


Synergy, baby!

A Job You're Supposed to be Terrible At: Lessons from Six Months of Fieldwork

As of this morning, I've officially been in Japan for six months, at the pleasure of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science.  I have six months left on my current appointment, which was granted to me to fund research into Japanese hip hop.  Ethnography/fieldwork/journalism/ “research” is something you can only learn by doing it, and despite some previous experience this stretch has been full of new challenges. I guess it's a pretty rare situation I find myself in, but maybe more universal principles can be derived from the various ways I've screwed up.

Writing is an Excuse for Not Working. In the afterglow of completing a dissertation that was at best 15% fieldwork, this has been the biggest, hardest lesson.  I had worked hard to develop a craftsman's discipline – getting up every day and writing for three or four hours, crawling bit by bit through a big project.  Writing was the be all and end all, the Alpha and Omega of my existence as a doctoral candidate, and as a job seeker in the academic market.  So it was strange when, on finding out about my posting, a member of my committee gave me this sterling advice: “Don't worry about writing.  Focus on research.”

Research is What Happens While you Make Plans.  It's important – even vital – to have a research agenda.  There are, of course, plans to be made, appointments to set up, contacts to cultivate online.  But it's even more vital to figure out the right place to spend time doing nothing.  This may seem like the most obvious thing in the world to properly trained ethnographers or anthropologists, but particularly for someone trained in theory, it takes a while to sink in.  I end up with notebook pages full of hot leads, new contacts, and essential facts just from sitting in a bar or in someone's office with no particular agenda.  It's a lesson for life, really – be ready for anything, including boredom.  Boredom, after all, is the seedbed of opportunity.

Booze is in Fact Not an an Ethnographer’s Best Friend. I (and I know I’m not alone in this) drank a lot in graduate school.  Considerably more, even, than I drank in college. Since most of my initial research took place in bars and nightclubs, the habit naturally continued during my doctoral research. And on some level I found it a lot easier to interact with people in Japanese after downing a few beers.  But there comes a certain inflection point where that method of connecting to people becomes less and less effective – particularly, this is true once you’re already a known quantity in a community and the job becomes much more about following up on leads and interviewing people, or more generally about pursuing a particular agenda rather than just learning “the lay of the land.”  I actually had to quit drinking entirely for health reasons about a month ago (don’t mix booze and allergy meds!), and I’ve found myself a lot more effective since then, because I’m able to be more methodical and less impressionistic.  Not to mention the crazy amounts of money I’ve saved.

Quit Getting Up So Early. Depending on your specialty, a corollary to Lesson 2.  In the world of music, the only things that are going to happen before noon are things you do alone.  And that's not where the action is.

Shit Happens (So Take Care of Yourself). On top of the predictable challenges and time-consumption of moving and settling into a foreign country, I got pretty ill for about two and a half months this past fall. This wasn't a life-threatening illness, but rather a combination of allergies and sinus infections that took my energy levels and focus down to about 70%.  I spent this period repeatedly cursing myself for collapsing exhausted before getting out to shows where I could do research (see also Lesson 3), meanwhile feeling certain that health was just around the corner.  What I didn't do was go to the frickin' doctor.  The language barrier was certainly an intimidation factor, but I  should have known better.

And finally, Blogging is Fantastic. Not only does an online notebook give you a great place to collect the random thoughts and tidbits of information that collect like whitecap flotsam during a project like this, without drawing you into the vortextual depths of overthinking, it simultaneously gives you a platform for networking, an increasingly vital element of research - to say nothing of the infinite joys of self-promotion.