雑記帳　長崎・小浜温泉では「ＯＢＡＭＡ感謝祭」

I have only one problem with Japanese people in blackface: it’s totally inexcusably awful. I hate to be shrill about this, and outrage in this case feels like almost like a cliche, but how many more of these are we going to have to see?

Let’s assume for a minute that this sudden rash of Japanese blackface in the wake of Obama’s presidency is well-intentioned. Comedians and yuksters want to look like Obama, so they darken their faces. Does no one know that this is not okay outside of Japan? And more to the point, do people understand that putting these images on the internet means that non-Japanese will view them and say, wow, this Japanese man in blackface in imitation of Obama is a total bummer and a blight on the Japanese nation?

Obama will be president for at least four years, if not more. Someone needs to drop the hint now — in some kind of well-orchestrated national campaign — that Japanese comedians and actors can’t do their Obama imitations in blackface (or even worse, crappy blackface) for the entire span of the Obama administration. Otherwise, this problem is only going to get worse.

Spike Lee’s Bamboolzed is not his greatest work, but it definitively tackles the core issues at the heart of the blackface debate. (Wait, is this even a “debate”? You just are not supposed to do blackface in contemporary global society. Case closed.) Can we send a boatload of Region 2 DVDs of this film over here and pass them out?

I leave you with hopefully one of the last examples of Japan’s Blackface Era: a truly terrible Obama in blackface and fuzzy black wig in the world of Super Mario.

DOCTOR: “Hmm, so you can write your address in kanji. That puts you ahead of our prime minister at least.”

ME: “?… Uh, ha ha ha!” (Thinks: I wish we could talk politics after my health is seen to.)

DOCTOR: “Yep, you’ve definitely got the drop on ol’ ‘Aho Tarō’.”

Japan’s Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance

The main point of this story is that PM Aso is kind of a discriminatory asshole, but I wanted to point something else out:

“The situation has improved over all,” said Takeshi Kitano, chief of the human rights division in Osaka’s prefectural government. “But there are problems left.”

How awesome is Japan’s famed director and funnyman Beat Takeshi? He can apparently find time between hosting TV shows to be Osaka’s chief human rights officer.

(Update #2: I scorched some text.)

COMICS REVIEW / Translation bat-mangled in ‘Bat-Manga!’

This review is pretty damning of the new book Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. Translation was either totally botched or intentionally rendered as bad English. The original manga artist’s name is basically nowhere to be found on the cover.

I was watching some Mahha Go Go Go last year on Japanese cable and realized that at least half the reason this particular anime struck me as so “strange” as a kid was the fault of the American localizers, who stuffed very reasonable and almost Zen scenes of no dialogue with mile-a-minute narration and unnatural speech patterns. Seems like something similar is going on with the Batman book: the Orientalization of Japanese culture requires everyone to pitch in. The source material may be slightly “off” by Western standards, but it’s the foreign localizers who really amp up the eccentricity in the material. They are like the enablers of “crazy Japan.”

(Hat tip to Matt Alt for sending the article my way.)

Times when you wish the guy next you was reading monster-rape manga: Today, on the Ginza Line, the fellow to my left was reading some kind of journal of veterinary surgery — with lots of graphic color photography.

Some photographic results from the recent workshop I did with the undergrad students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. One student brought along a handful of printouts of the patterns I’ve been posting on NéoJeo for inclusion. Smart dude. he brought it back home. The shoppe was really fun.
The Meeting Modernity opening was a blast! Almost 200 folks wandered through from 6 to 9. Thanks to everyone for coming out and supporting!

This is the most ridiculous article ever:

Trouble feared as gang moves HQ few blocks from enemy’s

Let’s replace a few key nouns and read it with a non-Japan perspective:

The Metropolitan Police Department announced Wednesday that a violent drug gang and extortion syndicate has moved its headquarters from Queens to Times Square, about 250 yards from a rival violent drug gang’s headquarters.

According to the MPD, the Times Square building in which the drug gang’s headquarters is housed was purchased by an affiliated firm of the gang organization in September together with its land lot. The firm’s president is a senior drug gang member.

According to the MPD, starting Wednesday, Times Square Police Station deployed patrol cars at a parking lot in front of the Times Square building and station several policemen in the area around the clock as an emergency measure.

The drug gang in question is the nation’s third-biggest designated crime syndicate, after two other large drug syndicates.

The rival drug gang’s headquarters is located in a condominium about 250 yards northeast of the new drug gang headquarters building. The rival drug gang claims areas around its headquarters as its operating territory.

The MPD will establish a panel designed to remove gang organizations with the participation of local residents and corporate representatives on Jan. 21 in an attempt to remove gangs from the district.

The MPD believes tension between the two groups could rise as drug gang relocated its headquarters to the Times Square building.

MPD sources said that a senior drug gang member told an MPD investigator who was monitoring a New Year meeting of drug gang in New Jersey on Wednesday that the gang had started to use the Times Square building as its headquarters starting that day.

According to the MPD, the affiliated company bought the land and building from a real estate company in New Jersey in early September.

The land measures about 100 square yards, and the building has a floor space of about 260 square yards, covering three stories and a basement.

According to the property register book, no mortgage was taken out on the land and the 18-year-old building, which a real estate company in the area estimated that the gang likely spent about $3.2 million to acquire.

At about 4 pm, I became suddenly aware of my massive jetlaggedness, so I will keep this brief, and as a writerly affectation to represent my mental condition in text, also long-winded and “run-on.”

I am back in Japan after a few weeks at home in the “States.” Ian gets back soon and then we’ll be getting the team together to think up some more funnies and contents for this site we run called Néojaponisme. Be patient and read other sites on the internet while we are hard at work. (I say this every time, but you guys never listen.) Things will probably get kicking with some book reviews.

(Also, all those haters on the Girl Talk piece: here you go.)

America is getting to be like Japan in small ways. The economy has melted down, for example. My niece asked for a “bento box” next Christmas. The soap opera Guiding Light now looks exactly like prime time fare in Japan: cheap video, cheap lighting, location shoots and sound rather than studio-controlled conditions. If you Americans stop buying the products advertisers are advertising, all TV could fall to Japanese TV levels. Soon, every single American comedian will come from a single management company or something.

A big plus to America: food and clothing are dirt cheap. I am sure there are some kind of sophisticated reasons why prices in Japan are so high, but it always feels like highway robbery to see a necktie in Ginza, for example, at 250% the price of the American tag. I had been refusing to buy some Kiwi black shoe polish in nearby Lon Lon for 700 yen, and hey, looky haters, I got it for $2.99 at Target. My misplaced miserliness saved me nearly $4, which I will reinvest into the overpriced Japanese apparel industry.

Also, Japan needs more egg nog.

Here’s to a year of savings, post-materialism, and finding new uses for all the tattersall shirts you wore at age 18.

Néojaponisme’s exhibition Meeting Modernity will be in Portland from January 8 through February 1st in the new year at downtown small press emporium Reading Frenzy. The opening will be on January 8 from 6–9PM. I’ll be in attendance (as will Ma and Pa Lynam!), so come on down.

Recently discovered outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, the Meeting Modernity collection of found photos documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods. The series is comprised of portrait photography in particular.

Just got interviewed over at Graphic Hug.

New Yorker: I ♥ NOVELS

Japan-based bloggers, magazine writers, and newspaper correspondents: give up your day jobs (present writer included). We all just got schooled by New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear, who has written the best English article so far on the keitai shosetsu “cell phone novel” phenomenon. Two months in Japan was apparently all it took to hit all the important angles and catch 1,000 struggling Japan hands with their pants down.

A few points:

1) The keitai novel phenomena clearly links to the “yankii-zation” of Japanese pop culture. Not a new idea, but maybe the most important basic concept to explain what is going on right now in almost all cultural fields, especially fashion and music. ヤンキー＝短絡的思想. Japanese pop culture is, and has always been, all about socioeconomic class, who has power, who sets tastes. The upper middle class have been totally defeated in the realm of mass culture. Or they’ve retreated to some new space.

2) Goodyear does a pretty good job of making the ubiquitous author anonymity seem legitimate: authors are embarrassed about their work, even if successful.

3) Democratization of culture means more and more creators with “non-artistic” goals who create for personal satisfaction/catharsis but whose work, through the process of the market structure, becomes equalized in format to the old style of creator who had the traditional “artistic” reason to create. Yoshimoto Banana saying that keitai novels aren’t novels is not snobbery, it’s proper classification of motive and content.

Japan Probe: Man found guilty of sharing copies of foreign movies before their Japan release date

Two years in prison for fansubbing! I always wondered why Japanese bilinguals never added subtitles to movies that come out on DVD before they are even released in theatres in Japan, and here’s the answer: the government throws you in jail for two years. I guess that’s one way to stop piracy.

Hitler on Japanese TV (Hello Project Meets Hitler)

Young female idols from Hello! Project (Morning Musume, etc.) teach the Japanese television audience everything they need to know about 20th century German dictator Adolf Hitler. Did you know that he had a complex about his height??? Giggle, giggle, giggle.

For December, the final month of 2008, Néojaponisme will only be running “2008: The Year in Review” mini pieces, covering various topics from the year that is/was. Get your typing fingers ready for comment frenzy as we discuss the finer points of Japan’s economy, political system, pop culture, and technological progress!

As an American, this excellent post by fellow shitty patriot, American Sam McPheeters acutely captures a sentiment I felt just about two weeks ago as accurately as one could hope to. Hence, I quote it for the world citizenry who read this website:

“For those of us not running for First Lady, it seems safe to call it for what it is: Late Onset Patriotism. For the first time in my adult life, I’m actually proud of my country… Just as important as what we get is what we have been spared; four more years of sadistic fast-food incompetence, grumpy and perky flavored… Yesterday was the opposite of 9/11, almost surely the only such day anyone alive will ever experience. For one night, people across the planet covered their mouths in raw shock – a gesture eerily familiar from 9/11, but tracking to the extreme opposite end of the emotional spectrum. It was as if the Earth team had just won an intergalactic futbol championship. We’re in unknown territory.”

I am unsure if more appropriate and precise words have been spoken about the recent American election. I’m unsure what to do with this newfound sense of hope for millions of Americans. Wait for the new President to bungle, I imagine.