Heijo Palace, and lame mascotage

The frustrating, or maybe tantalizing, thing about visiting Nara has always been that it's not really there anymore. That was never really true, of course: you'd go because of the fantastic Buddhist temples and one super-awesome Shinto shrine that are there, and maybe also because of the museum. But those are there because the sleepy little country town of Nara was, in the 8th century, Heijô-kyô, capital of Japan, the country's first permanent capital in fact, patterned after the shining Tang Chinese metropolis of Chang'an, and pretty impressive in its own right. But it stopped being all that as the 8th century drew to a close, and for most of recorded history the temples have been all that remained: the great capital was dismantled, and the city plan was obscured, largely returning to farmland. A lot of it's still that way today; what isn't is faceless suburban sprawl (Nara is within commuting distance of Kyoto and Osaka).

That's the way things were when I first visited in 1993. Awe-inspiring temples, and beyond that, just rumors that there was once a capital there. The city center is now over by where the temples are, and the land that was once the imperial palace was (in 1993) under fields and railroad tracks.

This year is, as I think I mentioned, the 1300th anniversary of the establishment of Heijô-kyô, and for my money the best thing about it is that it convinced the country to rebuild the Imperial Palace there, part of it anyway, according to what ancient records and archaeological discoveries have told them it should look like. They've built the Daigokuden, or Audience Hall, the southern or Suzaku gate, and some walls enclosing the palace compound.

This is a very good thing. For the first time, you can get a sense of what this capital might have looked like. If you go this year, you can go through the Daigokuden, and also visit an on-site museum that boasts a replica of one of the kentôshi boats and a 3-D CG video of the whole ancient city. There are rumors that these latter installations, and the whole open-to-the-public thing, might not last beyond this anniversary year, so go quickly if you can. It would be a pity if it all closed for lack of funding, but then the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

On a personal note, seeing this restoration in its completed state was peculiarly satisfying, because in a way Mrs. Sgt T and I have kind of watched it go up. Her research takes her to Nara almost every year, and I accompany her sometimes, like I did this year. The Suzaku Gate was rebuilt in 1998, and I first saw it a few years later, with her - not being a classicist I'd heard nothing about it, and was flabbergasted to see this beautiful thing in the rice paddies from the windows of the Kintetsu train.

Every time we've been back since we've seen a little more of it done. A couple of years ago was the last time, and then we tramped all around the grounds, where building foundations are laid out - we saw the hulk of the Daigokuden, under construction, saw the Suzaku Gate up close for the first time, and ran for our lives from some kind of humongous insect that swarms down out of the trees at dusk in summer. (There are creepy-crawlies in Nara: this summer the missus got a rash on her arms from some poisonous caterpillar hairs that were blowing around in the breeze. Doctor said he sees it all the time.)

So here are some pix, courtesy of Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki. The first is the Daigokuden, the second is the Suzaku Gate as seen from the Daigokuden (that's the wonderfully named Kinki Railroad, or Kintetsu, in front).

And the third is the interior of one of the on-site souvenir shops. That fella is the Official 1300th Anniversary Mascot No. 1, "Sento-kun." He's supposed to represent an Indian Buddhist monk (the Nara period is also when Buddhist really took hold in Japan). The antlers are a tribute to the free-roaming deer that populate the parks and temples in "downtown" Nara.

You'll be pardoned for thinking that he's a singularly unattractive mascot. You wouldn't be alone: he's been the target of ridicule ever since he was announced in early 2008. Even his name is lame: it means "Moving the Capital"-kun, or Little Mr. Moving the Capital (i.e., to Nara). That's it. It's almost as clunky in Japanese as in English.

To be fair, he does kind of grow on you, especially after you've been hearing people rag on him for two years. Although I'm still not sure pity is the primary emotion you want people to feel when they see your mascot, he does kind of fit in with the kimo-kawaii aesthetic that's popular right now.

So unpopular was Sentokun that they introduced a buddy for him a few months later in '08: Manto-kun. At least his name is clever. Sen also means "thousand," so the next one up, in the Japanese numbering system, would logically be "ten thousand," or man: so, Manto-kun. Plus, "manto" means "cape" (from "mantle"), and he wears a cape. Unfortunately, he's also a deer with a building on his head. Strike two.

The final indignity was when some local Buddhist clergy got upset that Sentokun was seemingly making light of Buddhism - for chrissake, he's got antlers growing out of his head! So they came up with a third character to foist upon the public: Naamu-kun. He's supposed to look like a childhood version of Prince Shôtoku, who was instrumental in establishing Buddhism in Japan, and he's meant to teach kids Buddhist values. Even his name is a mantra. (Who says Japan doesn't take religion seriously?)

Strike three.

Gallagher lost it

I found this link through Andrew Sullivan, detailing how Gallagher ('80s comic, smashed fruit on stage with a sledgehammer) has become not only a show-biz has-been (no surprise), but also a right-wing hatemonger of alarming proportions. It's sad, but more than that it's horrifying.

Was Gallagher like that back in the day? I remember quite vividly watching a number of his cable specials. (The author has it wrong, by the way: Comedy Central wasn't around in the '80s. Gallagher became known to kids like us through Showtime specials.) (We didn't have Showtime. I watched them at friends' houses.) But I don't remember the jokes: I just remember the watermelon-smashing.

And unlike the author of the otherwise-excellent article, I'm not too hip to admit that the watermelon-smashing was brilliant comedy. It had on me something of the same impact (pun...not exactly intended, but foreseen) that my elders describe Lenny Bruce as having on them. In the violent yet harmless act of smashing fruit on stage (best when done under strobe lights), Gallagher revealed something about our attraction to, even need for, mindless destruction; he said something about destruction as a form of creativity; and he provided a deeply cathartic and gloriously transgressive moment for those of us who, for better or worse, were growing up in an increasingly repressive (of everything except greed) America.

It was perhaps inevitable that it devolved into schtick. Lenny Bruce would have, too, had he lived. And it was inevitable that the idea would be stolen - in the interview Gallagher gripes about Letterman stealing it, but Letterman only steals from the best: it was a compliment. (My favorite iteration of it on Letterman was dropping a bathtub full of chocolate pudding from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theatre, then following it with bowling balls.)

So Gallagher had his moment. What I don't remember (and I'm not sure I have the heart to search youtube enough to find out) is: was he this much of a racist, homophobic asshole back then, too?

Nara meisho mukashi annai

As I mentioned, one of the reasons we go back to Japan is to buy out bookstores, or come as close to it as our meager stash of cash will allow (which is, of course, not very close). And believe it or not I sometimes even read some of the stuff we buy; not always, but sometimes. I do enjoy books, and I do enjoy books in Japanese.

So within the first week after arriving this time around, immediately after finishing Pickwick, I had started four new books. Which is never good news for me, because try as I might I can't be in the middle of more than one book at a time (for pleasure reading, that is). I envy people who can be in the middle of three or four books at once, juggling them as the mood strikes them and reading all of them with adequate comprehension. I can't. So this time around I started a new book on Edo culture, Murakami Haruki's latest, another collection of Mizuki Shigeru's kappa manga, and this book, but before long this was the one I was carrying with me everywhere.

It's Nara meisho mukashi annai: Etoki Yamato meisho zue 奈良名所むかし案内〜絵とき「大和名所図会」, by Hondo Akira 本渡章 (Sôgensha 創元社 2007). Here's the deal.

There was a big boom in gazetteers in the late Tokugawa period: travel guides, beautifully illustrated, with facts both for the traveler (where to eat, what to buy) and for the armchair traveler (how each place described figures in literature and history, notes on local customs and lore). I'm fascinated by these things, by the way - they provide pleasure on so many levels. There's the frisson of the familiar, as you feel yourself united with these people from far away and long ago in your shared experience of tourism; there's the comfort of the reference work, as these books organize knowledge in a pleasing, orderly format; then there's the art, which is
unfailingly beautiful. (Beholdmyswarthyface-san writes a little bit about a famous one for Edo here.)

The most famous of these guidebooks were written by Akisato Ritô 秋里離島 and illustrated by Takehara Shunchôsai 竹原春朝斎. One of their productions was a guide to the city of Nara and its environs, called Yamato (an old name for the region) meisho zue; it was published in 1791.

The book in question is sort of a beginner's guide to the Yamato meisho zue. Rather than simply transcribing and annotating the original (which would be fairly long and difficult for modern readers), he selects thirty of the most interesting illustrations and writes about them, describing what they show, with quotations from the original. Clearly it was published as a way of tying the ongoing Edo boom to the boomlet in Nara stuff that is coinciding with the 1300th anniversary of the city.

And hey, that's what hooked me. I saw it in the museum shop at Narahaku and had to have it.

Is it any good? Sort of. As the above description suggests, it's really neither fish nor fowl. The scholar in me would have preferred a straight transcription - Hondo doesn't quote nearly enough from the original, preferring instead to mix quotes from the original with his own summary of the significance of each place. He's trying to make it function as both a guide to what Edo people thought of Nara and environs and a guidebook for moderns in its own right. But I have plenty of modern guidebooks, so I would have preferred this to focus solely on the earlier view. And as a modern guidebook, of course it's not very useful either - no maps, for one thing.

That said, it's easy to read, and the illustrations themselves are just wonderful. Wisely, Hondo includes selections from both the birds' eye views with which Akisato and Takehara introduce each place and the close-ups of various scenes from ancient legend and current custom. My favorite is the rock divers of Miyataki. This was a stretch of rough water in Yoshino where local guys would do trick-dives for the tourists, who would throw them money. The picture is amazing. Dig the guy doing a back-flip in the middle, and the tourists on the left saying "Holy shit!"

This was a good companion to keep with me during our trek around Nara. As an Edoist by vocation and an Edoite by avocation I found it a good way to personalize the trip, so I didn't feel like a total third wheel tagging along while the ancient-studies person in the family saw stuff she understands.

Emissaries to the Tang exhibit at Narahaku

Part of our reason for going to Japan was so Mrs. Sgt. T could visit Nara. Nara is the focus of much of her research, and this year happens to be the 1300th anniversary of its founding as the first permanent (at least, it was intended to be permanent) Chinese-style capital in Japanese history. Those may sound like a lot of qualifiers, but believe me, it was a big deal.

Usually when we visit Nara we hit a lot of temples. This time we didn't have much time; instead we visited museums and special exhibits. The big one of these was at the Nara National Museum: "Imperial Envoys to Tang China: Early Japanese Encounters with Continental Culture." The Japanese title, Dai Kentôshi Ten 大遣唐使展, was much more concise. It can be, because basically everybody in Japan knows what the kentôshi were: they were official envoys sent by the Japanese court to Tang China. There were nearly twenty such missions between the 7th and 9th centuries, and their job was to not only do diplomatic stuff (that's historiographical terminology, by the way) but to bring back Chinese culture, as much and as thoroughly as possible. Basically they were supposed to learn a lot of stuff, and bring back a lot of stuff. What kind of stuff? Books. One of the things they did was to buy as many books as they could bring back in their ships.

Mrs Sgt T's joke this whole trip was that we feel like kentôshi when we go back to Japan. It's true: as academics whose subject is Japan but whose base is the US, in particular a part of the US where books in Japanese are not quite as plentiful or easily obtained as one might wish, one of the things we do when we get back to Japan is to buy as many books as we possibly can. Scholarly monographs and manga, weighty reference works and light trash novels: we order them used, we buy them new, we pile them up and put 'em on boats. We're kentôshi, no doubt about it. And it's some comfort to know we're following in illustrious footsteps. Those who study history are sometimes delighted to realize they're repeating it.

So that was one thing I got out of the Great Kentôshi Exhibit: a better understanding of these people to whom the Mrs was comparing us. I love getting the joke, on those rare occasions I do.

The other thing I learned was: dude, emaki are awesome. I mean, I knew about them, and that they're very important. I've known people who studied them. But they're a little before my own period of specialization, and for some reason I guess I'd just never paid much attention. But they had one on display, the Kibi Daijin nyûtô emaki 吉備大臣入唐絵巻, or (as the MFA, which owns it and lent it to Narahaku for the exhibit, titles it) "Minister Kibi's Adventures in China." I love how the MFA cataloguers (donor?) add that "Adventures," as superhero-ish as it sounds, and as unjustified a "translation" as it is, because it perfectly captures the direct, vervacious spirit of this scroll. Japanese government official travels all the way to China, braving horrible dangers, only to face more peril at the hands of the wily Chinese - but don't worry, kids, he outsmarts them all!

This part was on display: the Chinese challenged Kibi to beat their masters at go. He cheated - he swallowed a piece. They try to find it - the way you try to find any game piece one of your kids has swallowed. You examine his spoor. Awesome!

Only a portion of the scroll was unrolled for view, but what was there was great. Really made me want to know the whole story. Eight years in Boston, and I only discover this jewel now, in Nara.

Silent movies on airplanes

I can't sleep on airplanes. Try as I might, I can never do more than drop off for a ten-minute nap. This poses a problem on ten-hour trans-Pacific flights, like the one I was on yesterday.

So how did I spend the time? I finished one of the four books I started in Japan a couple of weeks ago (more on which later). I listened to my iPod until the battery was almost dead. And I watched in-flight movies with the sound off.

Another thing I can't do on an airplane is commit to a movie. If it's worth seeing, I want to hold out for better viewing conditions than a miniscule screen, bad color, cropped frame, tinny sound, and constant interruptions. And if it's not worth seeing, it's not worth turning off the iPod for.

This time around it was romantic comedies back to back to back to back. Coincidence that I was just thinking about this genre the other day.

First up was Valentine's Day, starring Julia Roberts and and and and. This kind of ensemble cast thing can be fun: I liked Love, Actually, and some other examples I can't remember - in fact they're usually forgettable, but at least pleasant. This one I couldn't quite tell about, but what I did notice was that according to it, LA is a place inhabited mostly by blonde women with heart-shaped faces. There are some Asians, but they're mostly gardeners (the guy that owns the flower shop); some Latinos, but they're mostly laborers (the guy who delivers for the flower shop); some blacks, but they're mostly entertainers... I don't usually try to harp on this kind of thing, but with the sound off it really stood out.

Next up was When in Rome. We had kind of wanted to see this one, because we have such fond memories of Kristen Bell from Veronica Mars, but this wasn't that. In fact, of the four movies I saw on the plane this one worked best with the sound off. I felt like I was watching a silent movie - in other words I think I got everything I needed to. I could lip-read the few lines of dialogue that were essential, and everything else I could guess from situation and body language... Which is, I'd submit, either high praise for the movie, or pretty damning criticism. Take your pick.

The funnest was Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and Her Hair. Adams is a tremendously winning actress, cute as a button, and she does have nice hair: bouncy, sheeny, perfect for a Clairol commercial. I spent the whole movie just gazing at it. Which was its own reward: at first I was laughing because in every scene she has a completely different hairdo. And her hair is always perfectly styled, no matter how disheveled she's supposed to look. Then I realized that she had different hair in every shot. Clearly what happened is that the hairdresser rushed in between takes to re-coiff her, and the continuity editor never noticed that in one take her hair is tucked behind her left shoulder, and in another it's hanging down in front of her left shoulder. Once you notice it, you can't stop watching - it happens in scene after her scene. Quite amusing.

The last was 500 Days of Summer, which I should have liked if for no other reason than that it starred a brunette rather than a blonde - this, I think, is part of what marks it as Indie in its sensibilities. This, and the fact that the main characters look like five-year-olds dressed by parents with literature degrees. I was not in the mood for precious by this point, so I turned my attention to the iPod.

1974 Dead, 2010 Dylan, and Clarence White-era Byrds. Now that's entertainment.

Kuwata Keisuke's recent work

Kuwata Keisuke is one of the few Japanese pop stars who I really follow. Both in his solo work and in the context of his erstwhile band Southern All Stars, he's probably the only certifiable pop genius I've come across in Japan. As a songwriter he's trying to combine the mainstream J-pop hitmaking lyrical sensibility of Aku Yû with the poetic inventiveness of Bob Dylan and the pornographic cleverness of Prince (sometimes Kuwata makes Prince sound like the Church Lady), set to the unassailable tunefulness of Paul McCartney; as a performer he's equal parts McCartney and Mick Jagger. In other words, he's one of the few interesting lyricists in mainstream J-pop, one of the most consistently catchy songwriters around, and an always compelling performer.

His main flaw as an artist is that he's too prolific. It's just not summer in Japan without a new Kuwata Keisuke/SAS beach song, and it's just not Christmas without a new KK/SAS romantic ballad. Most years he obliges, but there are only so many variations he can wring out of these templates, and so his songs, brilliant as as they usually are individually, often tend to blend together.

Then again, sometimes he'll come up with something astounding, something that only he could come up with.

Take, for example, his work in the last year or so. This consists of:

1) a Kuwata Keisuke solo single called "Kimi ni sayonara." Three songs.

2) a Hara Yûko solo single called "Yume o arigatô." Two new songs. Hara Yûko is Kuwata's wife, also a member of SAS, and a solo artist in her own right; often her records are written, arranged, and produced by KK himself, which is the case here.

3) another Hara song, written and produced by KK, on a Hara Yûko collection released just last week.

Altogether, that's six new songs released on CD, but since one of these is eighteen minutes long, it all equals a whole album, at least of the vinyl variety. Considering that Kuwata has done more or less this amount of work every for the last thirty, it's a pretty good output for a guy in his fifties.

What's it all add up to? The lead Hara Yûko song is expert fluff, a bouncy pop number that sounds like it's meant to play in a video arcade; her already slightly surreal voice sounds like it might be auto-tuned, which would be typical of KK. The new song on the b-side, and two of the three songs on KK's single, are kind of forgettable.

But the bonus song on her anthology, also a KK production, is brilliant. "Kyoto monogatari," it's called, "Kyoto story," and the lyrics are essentially a bunch of Kyoto place names and catch words strung together. Musically it's a pastiche of mid-20th century pop, pre-rock, with some self-orientalizing musical color: there's a koto mixed in there with the horns, the strings, and the harpsichord. The whole thing is as rich and delicate and subtle as a piece of wagashi, which is to say it's a perfect pop confection.

In a very different way, the third song on KK's single is also a masterpiece. Called "Koe ni dashite utaitai Nihon bungaku" (Japanese literature I want to sing out loud), it's a medley of passages from modern Japanese literary classics set to music. The complete list is here (in Japanese) for those who are interested. As for the song itself, here's part one and here's part two. Musically, as well as lyrically, it's quite amazing: the melodies and arrangements are catchy, and each builds interestingly on the last; they're witty, too, with Akutagawa's Buddhist parable "The Spider's Thread" being given a raga-rock setting and Soseki's "I Am A Cat" turning into a thrashy funk stomp.

This is, I think, Kuwata's answer to the second side of Abbey Road. It's plain he's been thinking about Abbey Road lately. The cover to SAS's last album (in 2005), shown above, is an homage to Abbey Road's. And last year Kuwata gave a show in which he performed Abbey Road in its entirety - as mondegreens. That is, he wrote nonsense Japanese lyrics to all the song that approximated, soundwise, the way the English lyrics sound to Japanese ears.

The Abbey Road concert and the J-lit song were both part of a half-year miniseries Kuwata did on Japanese tv last year (I'm sorry I missed it; it's out on DVD, but way too expensive for me, and it leaves out the Abbey Road show) called Music Tiger (Ongaku tora-san), a reference to the famous Tora-san movies. The import of the title seems to have been not only that putting Kuwata in your iPod is like putting a tiger in your tank, but that he's also a roving lovable musical scoundrel - appropriately, the program found him covering an incredible range of tunes both Western and Japanese, both old and new, as well as a lot of new stuff and a broad swathe of his back catalog.

In other words, it's been a busy couple of years for Mr. Kuwata. And he has a new album coming out in October...

Something's Gotta Give (2003)

So I'm in Japan and I blog for the first time in a week and it's about this?

We watched Something's Gotta Give tonight for essentially the same reason that I'm blogging it. We were home (i.e., home in Japan) tonight for the first time in many days, and we were exhausted and needed something to vegetate to, and this was handy. Japanese TV is just as brain-numbing, but neither of us, pop culture fanatics though we are, can stand most Japanese television. We watch with great interest for the first day or two we're here, then we remember how unbelievably, maddeningly stupid most of it is. Brain-numbing, but in a bad way...

Is this a good movie? I have nothing against romantic comedies; I don't usually reach for them in a pile of DVDs, but I can appreciate a good one. This isn't entirely a good one. But it's enjoyable enough, up to a point.

The good: Diane Keaton, of course. There's a scene, after she and Jack have slept together, where he says something that leaves her at a loss for words, and you can see about ten different emotions crossing over her face before she says anything, from love to anger to embarrassment to rueful amusement to others too fleeting to quite identify. I'm not sure I know what good acting is, but I think this is it.

Also good: Keanu Reeves, surprisingly enough. I'm not sure I know what good acting is, and I've really never been sure Keanu can do it. I know a lot of people think he can't. And I'll admit that there's a very wooden quality about him in most of his roles. But in almost everything I've seen him in, this woodenness works in favor of his performance. This is true of Matrix, certainly, and of Dracula, too. I won't go so far as to say it's on purpose - that is, it may not be acting - but he's smart enough to usually only take roles in which his style of performance will be effective. It's effective here: I actually believed his character's attraction to, and then love for, Diane's: he's so direct, so preternaturally possessed, so unembellished, that you can buy him as a guy who knows what he feels and can see beyond social strictures.

Which makes it all the more a shame that the bad in this movie is so bad: the way it mercilessly tosses Reeves aside when he's served his purpose. You know from the start, because it's a romcom, that Diane and Jack will end up together, but I at least was rooting for Diane and Keanu. And the movie lets them stay together far too long - when Keanu is cast aside for Jack, you can't help but feel sorry for him. Especially because Jack's change of heart is explained in such a silly manner - like Diane's really going to forgive him because of a two-minute High Fidelity pastiche?

So Jack and Diane end up together. I knew that, and I was prepared to hate the movie because of it. But I have to admit, lousy writing aside, they have pretty good chemistry. And that, after all, is what you see a romantic comedy for. This onscreen chemistry thing is real, even if it's hard to quantify or analyze. And it's as good a reason as any to enjoy a movie.