I know these aren’t the best photos, but I was still figuring out how to use my camera at night (without a tripod). I’m sure the die-hard fans out there will recognize the ad and the location. 
The little town of Yokote in Akita province holds the Kamakura matsuri every year to honor the water god and to coincide with the lunar new year.
. . . fill in the blank.
Here’s one from me.
On the shinkansen from Hachinohe to Tokyo, I watched three hearing impaired teens slide into the three seats beside me. After about a half an hour, one of them pulled out two black guns and placed them on his lap.
When I saw the guns, my thought process went something like this.
1. I wonder what kind of portable video game these boys have with them that would allow them to use these guns to play. It must be a game that none of us have heard of in the US yet. I’m really curious about the console.
2. There is no portable video game anywhere in site.
3. I guess that in Japan it is legal to own a toy gun that is black matte and appears to have some weight given the way the boy is holding them and tossing them around. I don’t think you can have those kinds of gun in the US.
4. Those might be real guns.
5. Sh*t.
What would you do?
It’s only been recently that I’ve started to see hearing-impaired kids or adults in wheel-chairs in Japan at all. Until I was an adult, it was as though absolutely everyone was able-bodied and healthy (which I found out wasn’t true when I made a few visits to a mental-health hospital). The last thing I wanted to do was to appear like some bigot and accuse a group of hearing impaired kids of holding guns when they were just playing with toys.
And yet . . . I live in New York which brings with it a certain degree of deep anxiety. So, my mother and I decided to tell someone. The only person we could find — (a bento seller) — thanked us for the information, then said that the conductor of the train was very busy at the moment and that once he was free, she would convey the information. After a half an hour, the boys got off at Sendai. The bento seller never told the conductor.
Consider for a moment that these guns were very likely toys, and that we were simply erring on the side of caution. That’s fine.
But . . . what if?
Yes, I know that Japan is a safe country with an extremely low crime rate. Yes I know that it is very difficult to get your hands on a gun in Japan. But I’m still sort of surprised and fascinated by the fact that the bento seller actually never got the message through to the conductor, and that there wasn’t any sort of process in place for this kind of situation — this despite the removal of garbage cans on Shinkansen trains, and despite the ubiquitous (and I paraphrase): “The Japanese police is now on high alert! If you see anything suspicious, please alert someone immediately!”
Once we finally caught up with the conductor ourselves and told him what had happened, he did explain that there is a policy in place for this kind of situation; he would have looked at the guns, determined if they were toys or not, etc.
Now I am back in the land where, if I see kids pull two black matte heavy looking guns out on a train, I will not wonder if the guns are “toys.” I won’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings. Instead, I know from past experience, that my flight instinct will kick in and I’ll be out of that train car.
Glenn Davis, a former magazine editor at Tokyo Journal, has been appointed an executive producer at JBS, Japan’s first Internet TV station, which starts broadcasting worldwide on March 3.
There will be a press conference in Tokyo that day and a visit by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, according to media reports.
Among the other shows Davis has planned for JBS, one will feature longtime Tokyo resident Mark Schreiber doing two short weekly segments talking about current Japanese-language magazines and tabloid newspaper stories on a show called Offbeat Japan.
Links coming soon.
Uniforms are a ubiquitous part of the Japanese landscape. The Japanese start early–sometimes as early as kindergarten, and no later than junior high school. They often continue to wear uniforms throughout their working lives, both at white collar and blue collar jobs. Males and females alike wear uniforms at school and at blue collar worksites, but usually only females are required to wear them at white collar establishments (though one could easily make the case that business suits and ties are the equivalent of a uniform for males.)
This has been slowly changing over the years as the Japanese have come to prefer individual expression to their former taste for group solidarity. One small indication was the Fukuoka Bank’s change in policy in 2002 allowing its female employees to choose their own clothing while on the job. They claimed the reason was to present the image of a dynamic company that respected the individuality of its employees. Another unspoken factor may well have been that keeping pace with social trends ensured they could continue to attract a steady stream of job applicants.
The Nishinippon Shimbun (article not online) is reporting today, however, that the bank is reverting to its former policy of requiring uniforms for female employees. It’s not quite as restrictive as it sounds; the ladies will retain a degree of freedom in their clothing choices. In addition to providing the basic uniform in two different colors, the bank also will have three different colors for blouses and two different colors for scarves. The employees will have the freedom to mix and match to suit their taste.
Bank officials cite two reasons for bringing back the uniform requirement. The first is their desire to present a unified organizational image. The second is the concern over an inability to distinguish between employees and customers during robbery attempts.
I don’t think this is a particularly regressive move–it’s impossible for anyone in Japan to reverse the trend toward greater individualism, and everyone knows it. Though I’ve never been to the Fukuoka Bank, I suspect there may be another reason for the uniform requirement—a lack of what the bank may consider minimum standards of presentability and basic clothes sense among young Japanese women. The females working at commercial establishments that in the past would have required uniforms nowadays frequently show up for work in t-shirts and jeans. (So much for individual expression.)
While I don’t think that’s how the women at the Fukuoka Bank dressed for work, it’s conceivable that management may have been dissatisfied with their overall sense of style (or propriety) and wanted to maintain an image less casual and more suitable for a financial institution.
Jim Frederick, a Tokyo-based reporter for TIME magazine, profiled Bathing Ape’s founder and designer Nigo more than a year ago, calling him “Japan’s King of Cool,” noting:
Nigo never set out to become Japan’s hottest fashion designer or an internationally famous arbiter of style, or to show young [Japanese] how to rebel without losing their cool. But the fact that he is now one of the most influential movers and shakers of his generation — given how little attention he paid to cram schools, university examinations and the meticulous career planning that are still adolescent obsessions in Japan — does not strike him as particularly odd, either. In fact, he sees his focus on his passions, rather than on society’s expectations, as the secret of his success. “I never planned too far ahead,” says the 35-year-old, wearing a T shirt and jeans plus two necklaces and a giant watch dripping with hip-hop quantities of bling [not to mention that fact that his now sports two brilliant and colorful rows of diamond-studded teeth]. “I just tried to do what I love and create the things that I wanted to create.
CNN just aired a bilingual interview with Nigo yesterday in his Tokyo office, and I will post the full transcript as soon as it is up on the CNN site.
By the way, I wonder what is Nigo’s full Japanese name?
The Tottori government has submitted a bill to its prefectural assembly that will suspend indefinitely enforcement of a law designed to protect its citizens from racial discrimination and human rights violations.
“We need to make a thorough review as we have failed to obtain support from legal circles, which is essential for its implementation,” Tottori Gov. Yoshihiro Katayama said. “It is better not to set a deadline” for introducing the ordinance, he said.
The assembly approved the ordinance in October, making Tottori the first prefecture to initiate such a measure.
But the Tottori Bar Association has expressed concern about what it calls the arbitrary nature of the ordinance, noting it is left up to authorities to decide whether to reveal the names of rights abusers.
The ordinance was to take effect June 1 and was to run through March 2010. It lists eight types of human rights violations, including racial discrimination, physical abuse, sexual harassment and slander.
Opponents to the original ordinance claimed it was flawed, because it allowed prefectural police and other administrative entities of the prefecture to refuse be investigated.
The following is the cover of pirated DVD purchased in China. Check out the liner notes.
Contributed by Supercoolmanchu
A company in Osaka is selling cans that they say contain aromatic air from different sections of Osaka.
Three different scents are available at a price of 580 yen each, and the company claims that sniffing the contents of the can will make an Osaka native nostalgic for their Kansai home.
Historic Japanese town’s Snow Festival smaller but no less spectacular than Sapporo’s
Sapporo’s Yuki Matsuri — Snow Matsuri — may get all of the international press, and rightly so because of its incredible colossal snow sculptures that dwarf visitors, but neighboring Otaru has a snow festival of its own that, while small and humble, shines or rather gleams in its own right. It is known, appropriately enough, as the Snow Gleaming Festival - Yukiakari no Michi.
Ofer Shagan, a 40-year-old globetrotter in Tokyo realized his South Pacific dream adventure recently, and it went like this:
Ofer Shagan was naked except for a grass band around his head and a small piece of cloth around his penis. A handful of dark-skinned natives in traditional dress looked on as an elder adjusted the minuscule garment that barely covered the white man’s modesty. Shagan, 40, was about to become chief of a village on a small island in the South Pacific. If he was uncomfortable, he was doing a good job of hiding it.
Shagan, an Israeli-born long-time resident of Tokyo, stepped out from behind the palm-leaf fence in front of 1,000 locals and chiefs from other villages. Looking serious, he crossed arms with two elders and danced. A sweet perfume filled the air as the sounds of beating drums and the ocean waves became synchronized. “I was not embarrassed,” says Shagan as he recalls the scene last November. “It’s their tradition, and it’s beautiful.”
A recent post at several global websites features a startling video (NSFW!) that is purportedly from a late-night Japanese TV variety show, date uncertain, and it shows cats and Japanese women doing something unheard of.
It’s not pornographic, just, as I said above, startling, and strange. The video segment, posted on VideoBomb and BoingBoing, among hundreds of other blogs that have picked it up, has generated some interesting comments worldwide as well.
One Western viewer wrote: “This is not porn. It’s just a normal news show. My Japanese wife recognizes the reporter and says she was pretty well known in the early 1990s but she can’t remember her name. Nudity is not uncommon on Japanese broadcast TV.”
A novelist and professor in New York posted on her blog: “I couldn’t resist this story about a Japanese TV show about a cat that loves human milk -it resonates bizarrely/appealingly with all my 18th Century stuff about animals and humans and the blurry lines between them.”
Walk into a Catholic church and you’re immediately struck by the sight of a large crucifix on the wall. Suspended from the cross is the figure of the executed Christ, sometimes with a crown of bloody thorns. One look is enough to tell you all you need to know about the philosophy and the spirit guiding the activities conducted in that building.
Walk into some Shinto shrines in Japan, however, and you might be startled by the sight. Shinto isn’t really analogous to Christianity, and you can’t always figure out what’s going on from the objects you see. Nonetheless, one look is enough to tell you that the philosophy and spirit guiding whatever activities may be conducted there are entirely different.
Walk into the Kangi shrine in Shirahama-cho, Wakayama Prefecture, and you’ll see the objects shown in the accompanying photographs. Lest you think that the objects have been placed there to appeal to the contempory tastes of people who live in our modern, a go-go age, consider that this shrine was founded more than 1,300 years ago. In fact, the rocks shaped like male and female sex organs in the picture below are actually the enshrined deities on the site.
When you enter a Catholic church, you dip your fingers into holy water and make the sign of the cross. At the Kangi shrine, you rub one of these two objects with a prayer for marital harmony—males rub the female object, and females rub the male object. (Though I suppose if your sexual preferences lie elsewhere and you rubbed an object corresponding to your own sex, it’s unlikely that anyone would object.) The specially-folded white paper on the objects is called shide, a ritual implement in Shinto. It’s used as part of the purification process for items offered to the divinities.
Take a few minutes to consider all the implications of that. Besides the one that gives a new connotation to the term “holy roller”, of course.
I’ve made the point here before, but I think it bears repeating. The people who grow up in a culture where these sorts of objects and behavior are not particularly unusual and not considered abnormal are bound to be different in basic ways from the people who grow up elsewhere.
Episode 8 of the Japundit Podcast is now available on the Japundit Podcast website and at FeedBurner.
* Deadly Japan winter
* 14-year old pimps 13-year old
* School principal fired for calling bookie
* Pol pees on plane
* Ideal mate hard to find
* Funeral photos
* Whale meat back on school menus
* Brutal babes
* Driver’s ed? Sex ed?
Also:
* Japan’s celebrity cannibal
* Happy birthday Lil’ Kim
Japundit Contributors: Danny Bloom in Taiwan, David Weber in Tokyo, Mari Mockett in New York, Sylvain Bouchard in Sendai, Tubbypaws in the U.K., Bill “Ampontan” Sakovich in Kyushu, JP in Tokyo
Music - From Podsafe Music Network
* In your time more lead, by Pizzi Puti
* Gun, by .22
This episode of the Japundit Podcast is brought to you by J-LIST, the site that makes it simple to purchase Japanese products from anywhere.
The new issue of Lucky magazine is out in the states, and includes a good shopping guide to Tokyo. Granted, the emphasis is on clothes for girls, but the guide does cover the hip neighborhoods of Shibuya, Harajuku (of course), upscale Aoyama, Daikanyama and the more recently discovered Nakameguro. I think this issue is worth buying and keeping if you at all plan to go to Tokyo in the future and want some tips on where to shop. I particularly liked that the Lucky staff covered the shopping etiquette; when trying on clothes, for example, you will definitely have to cover your face with a cloth or bandana to keep makeup from rubbing off on to your potential purchase.
If you are curious about Harajuku, Mari did a nice post about it and you can see what she has to say. Here’s another even more comprehensive post by her. She says that she isn’t a Harajuku person any more and that she perfers Aoyama. I guess I have to say I feel the same way, though I love some of the T-shirts you can buy in Harajuku. I also love Daikanyama, which has one of my favorite, if somewhat expensive stores, that sells shirts you can only buy in Japan.
When I talked to my fashionable cousin about Tokyo, he was emphatic that I go to Urahara (or the back of Harajuku) which is supposedly the truly cool part of Harajuku, as opposed to the “tourist” part.
I couldn’t leave Tokyo without a manicure, this time with a spring theme. I’ll be sad when this disappears.
