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Why Isn't Chiyori Famous? or, a Grainy Endoscopy of the Japanese Music Industry

I have plenty to say here, but let's let her speak for herself first, in this video from a performance last night at a small club called Bed in Ikebukuro (Western Tokyo):



So, now you'll have at least some small sense of where I'm coming from.  This is a woman with gifts in the realm of an Amy Winehouse or Adele (admittedly, this video doesn't quite do those justice), but with a fierce and unique, subtle strangeness that she seems barely aware or in control of (a fact this particular song does highlight).  The question is, why is she playing a tiny club like Bed, after putting out a full-length album on a relatively high-profile indie, and putting in years worth of work building a series of events and nights (including this monthly event, Zettai-Mu, itself)?  As she said herself when I walked in last night, Bed is "a pretty ghetto club," though in Tokyo that means more 'marginal and cheap' than 'sketchy and dangerous' (You can read her blog here (Japanese), and hear a few more polished recordings here).

In fact, I had a far better time there last night than I did on Friday at Air, which had a vastly superior soundsystem, some great DJs, and all the personality and atmosphere of a Soviet pharmacy.  Air is one of what I would call Tokyo's "listening clubs," places including Daikanyama Unit, WWW in Shibuya, and Liquidroom.  They have the most mind-bogglingly incredible sound systems (I'm willing to bet) of any club their size on the planet.  And they're all beautiful.  But they cater to an aggressively upscale trendy market (editors note: decidedly not a 'hipster' market, but young professionals).  They most often feel like a collection of strangers, though there are exceptions (for instance, when Liquidroom hosts smaller events in its upstairs lounge).

On the other hand, there are smaller places, quite literally on the outskirts, like Heavy Sick Zero in Nakano, Bed in Ikebukuro, or Family, which is able to exist in Shibuya only because it's literally the size of my apartment.  These clubs host smaller, sometimes stranger, always more amateurish shows, for crowds that tend to be more intimate.  They're also usually cheaper (entrance to Bed on Saturday was 1/2 to 1/3 the charge for Air on Friday, even though Air was basically just a DJ night and Bed had three bands).

The Second Lost Generation - The Story of One Wandering Japanese Engineer

At first it might not seem that cataclysmic that only 90.1 percent of Japanese college grads had jobs lined up on graduation.  But the current slump is likely to create a "lost generation" in which large numbers of probably high achievers are completely or largely locked out of the conventional job market, and forced into part-time, temporary, or international work.  That's because of a hiring system that only gives seekers one shot - in the period just after they graduate.  Those who either want to take some time off, or who slip through the hiring cracks despite a sincere effort, are out of luck.  I spent about eight months after my (alread unconventionally late) graduation living on a friends' couch, substitute teaching, then hitchhiking across the U.S. and travelling in Mexico.  If I had been Japanese, I'd have been screwed.

I had a brief conversation last night with a guy who has actually had to leave Japan twice for economic reasons.  He was part of a previous 'lost generation' of the mid-1990s, and had ended up living and working in New Jersey for several years as a young man, including being in the National Guard, which he told me was a possibility for permanent residents - news to me.  This is of course pretty adventurous, and he seemed like he'd banked some pretty amazing experiences, but what he wasn't doing during the most dynamic phase of his life was contributing to Japanese economy and society.

He did eventually get back to Japan and, with the experience accrued (in engineering) in America, got a job with the Japanese arm of a European company.  And then came the Lehmann shock, and the Tokyo office got folded and combined with the Shanghai branch.  So he was back on his ass, and subsequently couldn't find work for a year.  Now he's doing some (frankly illegal) entrepreneuring, running a company that scans books from Amazon Japan for use on e-readers, since there is as yet no e-book market there.  He had imported a Kindle from the U.S. (which I've seen before but this time particularly struck me as impressive) and clearly had a lot to offer in terms of insight and innovation to Japanese society.  Unfortunately (as confirmed by the small anarchist bar where I ran into him) he's now been almost totally relegated to the fringes, where it's unlikely he'll have an easy path to making those contributions.

In the economic tumult following Japan's largest natural disaster, there will be more like my new friend, having to improvise to survive outside of the mainstream of Japanese business culture.  The question is whether there will be any more second chances for them, or any new effort by the nation to make the most of its infamously dwindling workforce.

Photo Roundup: Nikko

Late last week I took a quick trip to Nikko, famous for its monkeys, hot springs, and an ornate shrine to the Tokugawa Shogunate.



The monkey thing is real.  Unfortunately it seems like contact with humans has not been great for their dispositions - just moments after I took this photo, these monkeys were aggressively harassing and chasing a woman in her sixties.  Hard to imagine anything more terrifying.

Regarding Workers

I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).

I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director.  The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school.  Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but  I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.

I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.

Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society.  Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom.  I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.

Food Fetish: Nikko, Yuba, and Localism in Japanese Junk Food

Towards the end of last week I spent a couple of days in Nikko, a nice relaxing solo trip.  I made a point of eating every variety of the local specialty, yuba, that I could get my hands on.  Yuba is made from the curd skimmed during the process of making soy milk, and is particularly associated with Nikko because it was a source of protein for the vegetarian yamabushi (mountain monks) that populated its famous shrines (and, in smaller numbers, still do).

It's more appetizing than it sounds, making this a tasty chance to trace an archetype of Japanese food localism.  In short, this localism is mostly a marketing strategy aimed at travelers that provides nominal variation while still keeping things comfortably familiar.  To wit:

A typical bowl of soba, you say? Not at all - it's yuba soba, transformed by those yellowish rolls.  This was the tastiest of the variations I tried, partly because it was eaten in a small restaurant at the end of a five-hour hike.

Interview: Strotter Inst.

At the beginning of the month, I was lucky enough to get my socks blown off by Strotter Inst, a.k.a. Christoph Hess, a Nordic mad scientist who has modified a series of turntables into some retrgrade form of drum machine, and feeds them fragments of destitute twelve-inch corpses to produce hypnotic industrial polyphony.  I was so enthused I took the time to send him a few questions, and he was generous enough to answer them. (All photos courtesy of Strotter's website).

Q: This was your first time to Japan, what did you think about it?

A: I just stayed for one week, but I have had a great time impressed by the whole town, meeting all these nice and friendly people. And it was big fun to play again with SXQ from Tokyo, after we met on a Russian tour in
2008.

Q: Are the audiences here much different than what you’re used to?

A: As I am lucky to play in very different kind of venues and scenes, I'm used to very different audiences. But I had hardly seen such an enthusiastic one like in Tokyo. Another point is the volume the concerts were played and no one was using earplugs...