Nakagami, Japan: The Life and Times of a Person and a Place
When fiction-writer Nakagami Kenji died in 1992, he was elegized with a chorus of “firsts” and “lasts.” He was the first Akutagawa Prize-winning writer born after the war, and he was the first big-ticket writer to self-identify as coming from a hisabetsu buraku background. The critical melancholy surrounding his death mourned him for being the “last” author, the final writer of pure fiction to command a mass audience while infusing his potboiler plots with the heavy lifting of the academic theory derived from anthropology and French philosophies that boomed in the “new academicism” of the 1980s via figures like Asada Akira, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Nakagami’s longtime friend Karatani Kōjin.
Nakagami was a writer not shy to embrace paradox. He worked for years as a baggage handler, writing fiction in bathroom stalls during his breaks; later he would travel the world, weighing in on philosophy and public intellectual life with figures like Jacques Derrida and Kim Chi-ha. He has been critically cast as a masculinist writer powered by primitivist energy, yet collaborated with eminently feminist writers, and wrote a series of novels on found fraternities of pan-Asian brothers who leave Japan to form failed utopias. In the 1970s, the buraku activist movement heated up, and the economy boomed. At the same time, the ethnographic concerns that underwrote high theory in France had not landed in their Tokyo appropriations. Nakagami’s writings took on the challenges of both reckoning with a reboot of Japanese literature by writing obscured buraku cultural forms back into it, and by branching out into new modes of print and popular culture story-telling that perplexed many but were sought after by a variety of editors. I will situate his writing project in the context of my own fieldwork living, learning and working in Tokyo in the 1990s, as the very shapes of literature, writing, and fiction took on new forms.
To sort out the intellectual, fictional, and social milieu of the 1970s milieu that in many ways still echoes, I map out the trajectory and materials of my recent book, Nakagami, Japan, and suggest some ways that Nakagami’s writings prove useful not only as Japanese literature, but as ways to imagine the lived and material realities of “information society,” a concept whose social, political and aesthetic facets have preoccupied many from the 1970s to the present.
These include:
–what role language, and the lived reality of its effects, plays in the public realms of culture, criminal justice and the legal system
–how to exert “ownership” over language in high and low realms to effect social change and achieve sovereignty (a word common in many post-Versailles movements of ethnic self-determination)
–assessing the ups and downs of casting oneself as a “minor” player in a major context such as nationalism and national infrastructures
–how economic, technical and social relations must be thought, as an alternative to the individualist emphasis on “subjectivity” (shutaisei) promoted by early-mid postwar thinkers?
–how fiction and the larger world of “writing” have to invent new kinds of realism to engage with new kinds of realities found in modern times and the postwar era.
Two images from the Good Food event under the Spring Street bridge this weekend.
A stunning array of carrot colors.
And here, a car as a vehicle for container gardening…
I tabled for a few hours, on behalf of Green Grounds then grabbed some HomeGirl tacos and beetled over to the site of a dig-in, in S LA, to catch the end and help put in a few plants, smooth some ground, and catch up with folks. A time-lapse shoot of the entire dig-in, from uprooting the lawn to laying the last succulent, should be on CNN’s Road to Rio program later in the month.
I recently caught an exhibition of black film posters by my friend/collaborator Ron Finley at the Museum of African American Art on Crenshaw in LA. It’s a kind of visual chronicle of posters for films that featured black casts, not only in Hollywood, but in films made elsewhere (France, “Orfeo Negro” from Brazil). It also includes posters for Hollywood films whose ad campaigns were coordinated and localized to the graphic and print languages of particular countries (there are many examples from Italy). The museum is a bit of a sleeper–literally on the same floor as sheets and bedding, the third floor of the Macy’s, next to Housewares. I helped a bit with grantwriting and concept stuff (my name’s on the wall, even!) and believe me, there are concepts aplenty to work with. This short YouTube of the opening shows some of the variety of posters–a selection of the 10,000–yes, ten thousand–that comprise Ron’s collection.
Some of the real standouts are the six-sheet of Cabin in the Sky–a milestone of style–and the multilingual posters from each of the countries where the films stopped. Also of note is the cursory image-less poster for Green Pastures, where someone could not be bothered to frame and pull out stars or plotlines. Many if not most of the posters were lithographs from Cleveland, an industry concentration I found fascinating.
And what came across most strongly, in keeping with the four-sheet or rare six-sheet dimensionality, was the way the posters were designed to be seen from different distances–the beholder as a staggered line of pedestrians or passers-by of city streets, who might come at them from any of a number of angles. The “lightbox” effect was most intriguing to me.
Here is a poster featuring the Nicholas Brothers, the celebrated tap-dancing team from Tin Pan Alley, Stormy Weather and many more, who appear, nonetheless, as the “Fratelli Nicholas” in small letters at the bottom right, beneath performers who are technically lesser lights. Check the way the red and yellow draw and then scatter your eye.
I’ve long had an interest in experimental typography. (In Tokyo every year, there is a fanfare to announce the kanji of the year, and you can’t really understand print culture without understanding calligraphy and the way everybody from fiction-writers to social movements have used it.) And wrote about it at length in my book, with reference to Japanese lit and its ways of portraying hyper-visible people through typography and the demands/lures it offers to readers and narrators through its interface. In the works I looked at, they were learned, long story short, in no small part through Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. What this exhibition really brought home to me anew was how much a part of the streetscape posters are–on par with graffiti art, the advertised city, and the varying scales and filters they inhabit as we see them, from different vantage points.
The exhibition is up till April 22, and anyone within range should take a trip to see it–the museum is open Thursday through Sundays. Spike Lee’s poster designer, Art Sims, will be giving a talk on the anatomy of the movie poster on April 14–come see for yourself. The exhibition is quite a thing to behold, and I am sure the talk will be in keeping with the high aesthetic bar these materials have set.
Born to run (as per one of the novel's epigraphs): schoolgirls in the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale. Source: NPR website.
The NPR piece on the film versions of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale aired yesterday. It’s available online, as we speak, here. I’ll be posting a more full-on follow-up later, but wanted to post a few thoughts. It was a really fun 45-minute conversation with Neda Ulaby, and the timing of a short radio feature didn’t have room for some contexts we might see the film in. And, just as important, some contexts through which we might see the 1999 book that inspired it.
For starters, here is the trailer for the 2003 Japanese film, with the inspired casting of comedian/actor/director Beat Takeshi as the dazzling and sinister teacher. I’ll say straight out that I don’t think The Hunger Games is a ripoff of Battle Royale (BR), the film. It actually bears much more resemblance to the novel, which stresses consumer culture (the market value of retro-artifacts like Keds tennis shoes) and living in the malaise of a declining empire. BR is set in a fictional place, the Republic of Greater East Asia, whose name is strongly reminiscent of the pre-war Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. This riffing on Japan’s rise and fall as an empire could be likened to how US journalists and writers have used the Roman empire to understand the economic and military battles of contemporary America. Rome, of course, is the classical point of reference for The Hunger Games; it is set in Panem, after all, a hat-tip to the legendary practice of bread and circuses. But even then, I think The Hunger Games‘ similarities are much more rooted in the way that the plots, crossings, images and tropes of myth and genre fiction have become familiar as story-telling rules and structures to people watching movies (and reading comics, and genre fiction, and playing video games…) since Joseph Campbell met George Lucas in the Star Wars saga.
I want to note 3 things from the trailer:
BR is not about reality TV like The Hunger Games is. You’ll note that the trailer focuses on the teacher figure. It is about living in a military-electronic surveillance culture whose audience is highly restricted to certain high-ups of the military who work in concert with the teacher, played by Beat Takeshi. Given that Takeshi usually plays gangsters of a very violent bent, we know it does not bode well for his young charges to see him standing in front of the classroom. In BR, there is very little sense of mugging for the camera in the way that The Hunger Games‘ Katniss is hyper-aware of manipulating her image–say, how her actions might lead to gifts bestowed on her by viewers who want to reward her virtue. Nor are there visually lush setpiece stunner scenes like the ones that feature Katniss’ growing awareness of herself as a performer through fashion. These are especially showy and film-ready in a sequence of performance art creations crafted by the fashion designer Cinna. These amalgams of the “am-I-a-floral-or-a-woodsy?” kind of self-awareness come partly from the playbook of teen magazines. And partly from the performance interludes of contemporary reality TV.
BR‘s characters shun the radar. They are kept under constant surveillance by the dog-collar-like chokers around their necks that they can’t remove–unless they want to be blown to smithereens. There is no feedback loop of pop audience enthusiasm whose input or caprice might determine their future. That caprice is channeled through the whims of Takeshi as sinister and casually rage-filled teacher, the standin for state authority (and all its out-of-it sloppiness…he is wearing a grotty track suit and can barely manage to work a cell phone to maintain a wreck of a relationship with his own teenage daughter). Reality TV in The Hunger Games enables the toggling between home and island, a “‘meanwhile’…back in the District” way of keeping family and home just out of reach. This toggling is not central to the BR story.
the novel, and later film, BR is very aware of its literary roots. Some key works here are the island sci-fi fictions of Jules Verne and the totalitarian stories of George Orwell. My friend/former colleague Tom Lamarre reminded me that Jules Verne was massively popular in Japan, and that his adventure story Deux ans de vacances (Two Years of Vacation, 1888), set on an island in the South Pacific, has inspired a number of anime. Shimmering from the pirate crate of stories that have been distributed through the global translation market since the 1800s, there is also an entire genre called the Robinsonade, after Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel of life on a deserted island after a shipwreck. A wonderful site devoted to these Robinsonades at the University of Florida’s children’s lit collection defines them as follows:
In the archetypical Robinsonade, the protagonist is suddenly isolated from the comforts of civilization, usually shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island. He must improvise the means of his survival from the limited resources at hand. The protagonist survives by his wits and the qualities of his cultural upbringing, which also enable him to prevail in conflicts with fellow castaways or over local peoples he may encounter. Some of the titles here may appear more tangentially related; for instance, collections of stories that include Robinsonades...Later works expanded on and explored this mythology. Though Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is set within tropical environs, several of the Robinsonades collected here tell the Crusoe story in settings as different as the Arctic, the American west, and other global locations.
Cover of Jules Verne's pioneering island story, 1888.
Obviously the Crusoe/Friday racial hierarchy is a little difficult to support these days. But the Robinsonade’s questions about collaboration, doubt and belief in other human beings, use of technology and tinkering to engage with the island terrain and make it one’s own territory…these all remain in both Japanese and English-language story-telling repertoires. Another difference in how earlier genre conventions like the Robinsonade were interpreted is that all the examples that BR draws on–and we could also throw in Lord of the Flies, among others–are thoroughly modern and have multiple iterations in Japanese anime and pop culture. These roots are somewhat different than the agrarian and Gaia-tinged mythic structure that filters through The Hunger Games. The invented language for people and rituals found in The Hunger Games recalls goddesses and fertility (Cornucopia, the Reaping) as well as the hunting-and-gathering survival stories of early American captivity narratives, and the post-apocalyptic eco-landscapes of someone like Margaret Atwood. It is not the electronic screen- and cable-based imaginary whose interfaces feature so strongly in the form of both the novel and film versions of BR–with its embedded infomercials, legal proclamations, intertitles and chapter breakdowns like the different levels of a video game.
and finally, the Bonnie and Clyde nature of the love story in both BR and The Hunger Games is different. Both end with a possibly doomed violent and youthful couple on the lam. Both couples are part of serial structures, to be continued. Both have female characters that are as technically capable and proficient at the arts of war as the male characters. This parity is not celebrated as a great stride in feminism in either work. But the gender/sexual politics are complicated and play out differently in BR and The Hunger Games. Unlike the heroic sacrificing parents and elder siblings of The Hunger Games (think of Katniss and her sister, and Rue), there are very few adults in BR. The few who appear are all wildly inappropriate and corrupt as role models: one father commits suicide, one teacher in a cameo role is buddy-buddy with the students purely in the service of his own ego; and Takeshi, the lead teacher, not only chaperones this whole undertaking, but escapes its grueling awfulness through fantasies of walking on the beach eating popsicles with the “good girl” who survives the film. The subject of adult corruption deserves a blog post of its own, given the weird scrutiny on youth crime in late 1990s Japan. Long story short, BR‘s characters are truly launched into a great unknown when they end in the consumer neighborhood of Umeda, in Osaka; we’re left pretty sure the story is anti-war, and anti-empire, but not so sure it’s pro-peace. Whereas there is something very pastoral about The Hunger Games‘ longing to get it all over with, go back to the domestic scene, reunite, make your peace with things and memories, and sort things out from a usable past…which of course crescendoes to a revolution that might unhinge the whole domestic project. So, to be continued…
Sea urchins anyway…this is a restored version of a lovely film by Jean Painlevé called, simply, “Sea Urchins” (Oursins). Score is by Yo La Tengo.
Some students from class have been watching some of the Painlevé films, released a few years back in a lovely Criterion edition. Other films include “Sea Ballerinas” and “The Love Life of the Octopus.” We’re especially interested in sea creatures, because their poetic filaments swim so elegantly in Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s 1971 film on Minamata. One fisherman describes his intimate life with the octopus, from catching them, to biting into them live, to cooking them up with soy sauce and a bit of sugar. The music is pastoral, the fins gorgeous, but humans here are a part of nature–just as likely to bite you as to stun you with beauty and grace.
A bit blurry but a shot of Tsuchimoto in languid pursuit of the octopus.
Fisherman Onoue-san's exegesis of octopus form in the kitchen.
I’ve been preparing for a guest lecture at UC Riverside next week. I’ll be screening the film Giants and Toys, and then talking about the film’s pop art style and its story of the “caramel wars” set in late 1950s Tokyo. I’ve been looking up the histories of portable food and individuated food from the 50s in both the US and Japan. This is because the characters in Giants and Toys run around the city in a blizzard of ads and bright lights promoting the caramels of three rival companies.
While G&T itself is both delighted in and repelled by the image cultures that are spun out of marketing caramels, it is worth thinking for a moment about the little candy and its history.
Many of us probably associate caramels with the bite-sized plastic-wrapped Kraft caramel that used to be tossed into bags and pillowcases at Halloween, or bought for 2 cents at a “mom and pop” store. Here is a 1959 ad that touts the giveaway possibilities of America’s favorite industrial caramel.
The ad campaign links butter, wholesomeness, Halloween and Fudgies (sold separately; no comment needed on the caramel color line) (Source: Found in Mom’s Basement)
Kraft began making and marketing caramels in 1933; this makes it something of a candy-come-lately with respect to Japan’s mass production of caramels, which began in the Meiji era–in 1899 to be exact. The Morinaga “milk caramel” company began making caramels on the heels of a “boom” in trade with England:
The “history” section of the Morinaga milk caramel website
Today, Morinaga caramels still groove on the same sepia-toned “old-timey”-ness, and tap into a nostalgia that has lasted almost as long as the caramels themselves. Here is what Morinaga caramels look like today, in both “kurosato” (black sugar) flavor and “milk” flavor:
Morinaga black sugar caramels–think Okinawa, Taiwan
A current box of Morinaga milk caramels–think Hokkaido
Skipping briefly to other flashes of caramel from contemporary life, let’s look at the anime My Neighbor Totoro, by MIYAZAKI Hayao. Miyazaki’s films often feature characters feeding each other as a shorthand for nostalgia, community, empathy, and comfort (in a word, nukumori 温もり…ぬくもりなが？). It’s actually a 15-minute sequel to Totoro that expresses the caramel-emotional complex most clearly:
In Mei and the Kitten Bus (Mei to koneko no basu), caramel=gesture of simple friendship
And caramels play an intriguing part in 1960s leftist student movement politics, and their gender relations–female students complained that they were sidelined to the role of “caramel mamas” by didactic male revolutionaries. But that is a story for another day…
A couple of weeks ago, after the frenzy of film screenings dialed back a little, I had a chance to attend a workshop on dashi that one of my collaborators gave. Sonoko Sakai organized a small troupe at a restaurant in Torrance, and talked us through the hows and histories of how to make various kinds of stock, and how to serve them in soups and other dishes. Dashi is basically the same thing as stock, but is usually made from a single ingredient, not the cocktail of things you might put in a soup stock. The occasion was a visit by some bona fide artisans of the Tokyo and Kyoto food worlds–a rep from a 250-year-old dashi shop, Yaguchi honten (main store), and another from a very esteemed maker of Kyōfū, or a kind of wheat gluten made for monastic cuisine (shojin ryōri). This shop, Hanbei, opened its doors in 1689. Also in the mix were an amazing miso from the island of Sado, seaweed from Tokushima, and Nagasaki mushrooms.
Sonoko and the rep from Yaguchi honten, a wholesaler of artisanal dashi materials. The photos above were taken in places where katsuo are fished; the packets behind contain wakame, nori and katsuo bushi
Along with the soups, we got a chance to look at–and taste and smell, and grate–a lot of the raw materials. We usually encounter katsuo bushi–grated katsuo fish–in its shaved form, when it looks like large, pinkish pencil shavings like you see in the cellophane bag here. Here is what the honmono–real thing–looks like, as a slab of dense, smoked fish that almost has the texture of petrified wood. We got to grate it on a gadget made especially for this, a wooden slab with razor-sharp blade through which the shavings drop into a neat wooden box. You remove the blade-lid and get a big fluffy pile of katsuo bushi. This then goes into water, with konbu, and is quickly removed, possibly to be used in a “second flush” for a less delicate soup, and then possibly third, chopped up and seasoned with salt and sesame, dried and used as furikake, sprinkled on rice.
A slab of high-grade smoked katsuo, ready for grating
And this is what one of the soups looks like with miso and little baked balls of kyōfū dropped into the soup. They float and gradually sop up the soup to a nice mochi-like consistency.
Here is today’s lesson in kinetics, from Violent Cop. The wobbling gait of rogue cop Azuma as he ambles through Tokyo, played by sometime comedian, sometime deadpan actor, Kitano Takeshi.
All week long I have been doing research for a radio piece which will air on NPR in mid-March. It concerns gangster films, horror, teenagers, and fans of genre fiction and film, with a twist of reality TV. This has all resulted in a mad rush of viewing yakuza films, a genre I have only really dabbled in viewing, with my knowledge very much skewed to freestyle elements like Suzuki Seijun and Yanagimachi Mitsuo. Yanagimachi’s 1976 verité work Godspeed You Black Emperor! not only documented the grainy lives of budding chinpira gateway gangsters…
but inspired quite a good avant-gardeish Montreal band.
Nor was I familiar with the work of Kume Daisaku, the guy who converted Satie’s wistful piano piece, “Gnossienne #1,” into the more aggro and less pensive electronic score for Kitano’s walk across the bridges and catwalks of Tokyo. This is how the original piano version sounds.
This piece is remarkably apt for adaptation to Kitano’s notoriously expressive body because it has no time signature and no bar lines. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of free verse, the poetic movement pioneered by Wordsworth (among others) in which the rhythms of vernacular speech banished the formal constraints of tight rhymed verse. Kitano’s gait does just that, as does his persona in the film, and others it traverses, establishing its own internal rhythm, whose relentlessness and lack of self-reflection is beautifully established in Kume’s re-write, above.
Butterflies pinned artfully to the wall, the décor of Misako's apartment in Branded to Kill.
The only thing more baroque than a Suzuki Seijun film is, possibly, a plot summary of a Suzuki Seijun film. The “rice films” series got off to a successful start last night. This is the handout I put together to try to impose a little story-order on Branded to Kill.
To introduce it, I talked a little bit about the rash of novels and films in the mid-1960s that dwelled on the issue of white-collar men disappearing…the “missing person problem,” just walking right off the map. Imamura Shōhei’s A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu 人間蒸発) is the classic cinema verité example, and Abe Kōbo’s many stories about men who turn into sticks, or live in boxes, or who walk off into sand dunes also qualify.
Suzuki’s films cross over because their protagonists are always trying to camouflage themselves into the landscape–whether appropriating its pop art architecture as places to cache themselves,
Hanada caches himself in an ad for cigarettes in Branded to Kill
sporting baby-blue suits that blend into sky color,
Tetsu, the baby-blue gangster in Tokyo Drifter.
Tokyo Tower peeps out from behind a tree in Tokyo Drifter.
or obsessing on the ambient smell of rice as it evaporates into thin air, as does the killer in Branded to Kill. The title of A Man Vanishes, in Japanese, is actually more like “a man vaporizes,” drawing on the properties of water as it transforms states and sublimates.
Shishidō Jo takes in the ambient vapors of the Paloma rice cooker.
