Social Class 9

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.

Audrey Hepburn

Today started with a touch of innocence when I lifted the window blinds. There was a boy in the street with his mum, both waving at the passing rubbish collectors (Japanese equivalent of bin-men) who in turn waved heartily back. Such an endearing sight, as if straight from the tacky alleys of Disneyland. Except this was a show of a child’s genuine wonder. And no wonder these men in pastel-green uniforms turned at once dignified and impassioned.

Such scene would be harder to imagine in the gritty environs of, say, any impoverished country in Asia. North Korea would be an obvious exception, where I imagine schoolkids are told to wave red flags and sing songs of praise as the proud rubbish collectors cruise the streets, picking whatever meagre waste there is to pick.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous today – crisp, sunny, the air feather-light. At about 2 pm I decided to make my move. I got on a bike and cycled to downtown Kyoto. I had previously made a tentative plan to pay a visit to this particular art gallery, based on their poster which showed a urban scene from an unidentified country, presumably in the southeast Asia.

The gallery was somewhat difficult to locate as it was tucked in on the third floor of a nondescript block of flats – simply a flat converted into a gallery space. I opened the door without knocking. There was nobody inside apart from a woman at a desk behind a sort of folding screen (she was constantly on the phone during my 10-minute visit). When I entered she protruded her head from behind the screen and we smiled in acknowledgement.

The installation itself consisted of a 3-minute video loop projection (shot by a car-cam) and about a dozen of photograph prints depicting peopled cityscapes. Those taken on the streets of Vietnam (presumably Hanoi, the Old Quarter) were the most striking. The author, John Einarsen, is partial to blue-collar folks going about their daily routine – be it twiddling thumbs at a bird shop, washing pots and plastic potties, or revolving pieces of meat on a skewer.

Each (neatly framed) print actually carries a price tag of ¥20.000, that’s about €200. That these ‘photographic items’ are on sale is hardly surprising in our age of global commercialism. I imagined what sort of people would want to buy prints of the impoverished metropolitan ordinariness. The same middleclass philistine, I thought, who finds the aesthetic value in the exoticism of the under-privileged. The same sick middleclass kind who would hang these photos on their bedroom wall to glance at while having their middleclass shag in their middleclass comfy beds. That’s who, I thought.

And yet, to the casual observer like myself, these scenes also deliver a touch of colour, or at least the kind of surreal absurdity almost exclusive to the poorest stratum of any society. On one photo there is an untieable knot of umpteen electric and telephone wires that can be tolerated only by the ‘underclass’ and that makes you think how on earth they were put up there in the first place. On another there is a man’s head sticking out of a house tarpaulin cover and under him a street vendor with hands in his pockets and a body posture of someone who couldn’t care less. On another there is a cat trapped in a birdcage. On another there is laundry drying on a clothes line sponging up the smoke from a grilled meat takeaway underneath.

This kind of pathos evokes Italian and Yugoslav social satire films from the 60’s and 70’s. Directors like Fellini, Pasolini, Aleksandar Petrović, early Kusturica. But one particular film sprang to mind while I was at the gallery, that by Ettore Scola: ‘Brutti, sporchi e cattivi’ a.k.a. ‘Ugly, Dirty and Bad’ (1976). This was one of my favourites back in my formative years – I remember how we used to act out the whole scenes by heart. This synopsis from IMDB sums it up pretty well:

Four generations of a family live crowded together in a cardboard shantytown shack in the squalor of inner-city Rome. They plan to murder each other with poisoned dinners, arson, etc. The household engages in various forms of sexual idiosyncrasies, land swindles, incest, drugs and adultery.

Here we go: the (in)famous part in which the family has for once united in order to poison their miserly head of household, magnificently portrayed by Nino Manfredi. Warning: definitely NOT for the squeamish.

Kyoto Postcards from the Edge (p.1)

This tree at Nijo castle. I regularly pass this spot on pushbike, and today noticed something was different. Mysteriously broken.   

Kyoto local elections. This photo was actually taken earlier this year, and today I saw another canvassing van, only much larger. Homo politicus never sleeps.

Train delays attributed to jishin-jikko (an accident involving humans) are rather commonplace in Japan, especially on JR line - the suicide favourite. Sometimes it is a drunk or someone careless ending up on the railway tracks. The official English explanation manages to sound both odd and rather disturbing. Taken last week.

Daybreak

Daybreak

Waking up well before dawn to the tune of a wake-up ring I ordered just a few hours ago

feels like a day’s unfinished business. A couple of hours later our minibus bound for the Bodrum airport, having been delayed by sheep of the hazardous dirt-road, makes a fifteen-minute loo break (hardly anyone gets off).

The garden-restaurant by the lake Bafa, bustling with tourists when we made a stop heading in the opposite direction a week ago, is now shut but for a single lightbulb-lit counter selling exorbitant crisps and coffee. Our driver has disappeared from view. A few of us pace about aimlessly, hands in pockets. We count minutes, seconds. My empty stomach begs me to get a bag of Walkers’ Salt and Vinegar.  From a coop nearby a black cock is announcing dawn before it has a chance to announce itself.

I walk over to the lakeside. The water is one with the leaden sky: no horizon, but the glossy blackness of the waves like hurried volcanic surfs, albeit moving up the greyscale chart by each passing minute. I take out the camera, hoping to snap the daybreak in the making, those last dour ghosts of yesterday retreating, sinking like dead fish before the light rears its head behind the thawing hills.

The Sakura Vexations

It is the season of cherry blossoms. It is also the season of by-elections. And this year in particular it is the period of post-tsunami aftershocks, both literal and mental. The period of rebuilding the humbled towns and villages, of re-solidifying the country’s collective as well as many personal identities. Many have predicted it will take years. Some say the ‘new identity’ is bound to emerge: more honest, straightforward, transparent, less evasive, less self-interested. Maybe these are the new platforms on which the local politicians plan to pick up votes. Who knows. The only thing we are able to hear from the blaring speakers mounted on top of the canvassing vans, which incessantly cruise the cities and towns nationwide, are the usual slogans and the ubiquitous repetitions of the candidates’ names, morning day and night: Matsuda san! Matsuda san! Vote Matsuda! Thank you very much for your attention! Thank you so very much! Matsuda san! Matsuda… followed by a touch of Japanese irony: We are truly sorry to make so much noise! We sincerely apologize… Matsuda san! Vote Matsuda! — and so on, making you wish Matsuda-san suddenly materialized so you can punch him straight in the face.

The Happy Hopefuls

The public spaces where sakura are blooming are turning from places of wonder to tiny battlefields, where people are pushing, shoving and elbowing each other for that ‘perfect-angle’ digital snap. What’s even more surprising is that the usual ‘sumimasen’ and ‘gomenasai’ (pardon, excuse me), the hallmark expressions of Japanese politeness and awareness, are largely absent in these instances. Such is the commotion and hurry as if the blossoms would vanish the very next minute. As if people are so drawn in by the call of the annual exercise, they suddenly start regarding their fellow man as no more than a physical obstacle jeopardising a certain photographic mission. Insane. Yes, the beautiful sakura trees are very much about, but the access to them is perilously linked with the crowds and the potential annoyance they bring. To find a solitary cherry tree in a pristine, natural environment is truly a rarity these days. Unless you are lucky to live in the country, or perform a monk’s duty at a remote Zen temple. There, perhaps, one could truly become awestruck and consequently pen a haiku or two.

The following images were taken three days ago around Shijo-Kamogawa in central Kyoto (obstacles notwithstanding). Click to enlarge

  
April 08, 2011

Is It Ethical to Suffer?

The images of the Japanese calamity are overwhelming not only by revealing the vast physical damage but also by reminding us once again that humans are mere toys in the hands of mother nature. ‘Like toys’ was the often repeated phrase on people’s lips, here in Kyoto and probably elsewhere, as we watched cars, ships, houses being tossed about like children crash theirs in anger or boredom. The tectonic plates were either bored or very angry indeed on March 11^th. People spared by the wrathful tremors stood silently in awe and disbelief. On television, it was as if we were watching a high-budget disaster movie from the comfort of our armchairs, largely unable to find a suitably emotive response (the reminiscences of 9/11: as one of the Twin Towers has just collapsed a woman is screaming, ‘What the hell is going on!!’).

I was glued to the screen for the first couple of days but once my ahs and oh my gods started to sound less personal and more like united voices of democratic concern, I decided enough was enough. Not quite ‘mad as hell’, but I sure couldn’t take it any more: the horrifying headlines, the nuclear explosions, the misery in the north, the scares, the confusing charts, the mixed messages, the cautious experts versus the alarming voices of the news anchors. I was weary. So on the third day I ventured out to meet a friend. I didn’t care any more that the Fukushima plant was very much touch-and-go as yet another explosion was lurking round the corner. Jerry and I decided to go to the riverside, of all safe places. The Yodogawa riverbank was a perfect antidote to the claustrophobic environs of the past days. We brought out guitars, alcohol, poems and spent that afternoon jamming, drinking, chewing the fat. Maybe we chose to be there so that if someone asked us years later, ‘Where were you when the reactor 2 blew up?’ we’d say, ‘At the riverside, drinking booze’.

Watching other people’s misery on the television for hours on end gave me a consoling, if largely false, notion that I was being compassionate and concerned (if one wants to show compassion one should donate money to charity). On the other hand, my running away to the riverside despite the potential danger to my well-being, however infinitesimal, was a potentially self-destructive act, verging on nihilism. Yet it made a perfect sense to me. Our perception is at the same time an evaluation, and every evaluation, being subjective, results in a choice, be it moral or immoral (what is ethical over here may be less so over there). What would your average ‘neo-nihilist’ have to say about this? Let’s look at what a certain philosophy student wrote on ‘Philosophy Forums’:

It is logically impossible to derive an "ought" prescription from an "is" description or a value from a fact. For example it may be a fact that we have evolved compassion to aid our survival. But from this fact it is impossible to derive the value that one "ought" to be compassionate. Such a transgression of logic is as invalid as deriving the value that one "ought" to be aggressive from the fact that we have evolved aggression. Morality then is not based on reason but on sentiment which is both biologically and culturally conditioned. As Hume stated : "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." (It is not contrary to reason, it is just highly unusual).

[…] We perceive what is of value to us. Nihilism per se is impossible due to human nature. But different things are valuable to different people and different creatures. Therefore this account is known as neo nihilism. Objective morality is an illusion and like religion is a means to control others.

[…] To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy... Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do.

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/metaethics-neo-nihilism-37641.html

To revert to the common suffering. In case you haven’t had enough of tsunami pictures, here is my pick of some of the most enduring ones. In the case of large-scale catastrophes, the aerial shots, the mid shots and the close-ups are all equally effective: buildings on fire, people being rescued or not rescued, people stuck in traffic, people tucked in street corners for the night, a man pondering a remoulded landscape, the elderly staring nowhere in particular. And then, the toys.

You can download hundreds of similar images in a large zip file (235 MB) here (if you can get past the uploader’s idiotic comment).

the lure of a hot spring

Japanese public bathing is sometimes referred to as hadaka no tsukiai (‘relationship in nude’). The idea is to lose clothes and forget about one’s age, status, background etc. Naked we are all equal. My recent visit to Arima onsen, located just north of Kobe city, was an opportunity to experience this relationship, or what Monthy Python’s Terry Jones, as a famous nude organist, once qualified as ‘two separate strands of existence, the essential nudity of man.’ And I came up with a poem which I am gladly sharing with you.

ARIMA

I am a double stranger here.

Here’s my Caucasian face

which by definition interferes

with the custom-held peace.

And here is my alien body.

So I play a double of myself,

a hairy-chest version in a documentary

hastily titled ‘In Pursuit of Health’.

I must heed the spa’s etiquette

to avoid that extra bit of attention –

how to arrange clothes in a basket,

how to undress in slow motion.

Guided by instinct and common sense

I screen my member by a hand towel,

take a splash in some suspense,

perch on the bath-edge like an owl,

then casually slide into hot bubbles –

all of which a called for attitude.

Here, no one’s asking for trouble.

They invest in relationships in nude.

At first, every ripple seems sacred.

Every leg movement, each glance,

each spatter down to a droplet:

that’s how begins a bath romance.

I get bolder as body gets warmer.

I move into an enormous teacup

in whose faintly green corner

a camomile bag bobs up.

Then it’s a kinsen, the iron bath.

It sports a kidney bean colour

and I want to laugh

as I fart into its rusty splendour.

I slip into a transparent ginsen

yielding to its smell of bleach

as long as I’m able to discern

my own foot within reach.

But after a while the mind

gives in to visions in the heat:

a man’s bald, jagged behind

I construe as a Hellenic sculpt.

Soon I arrive at a melting point

that reels me about like a drunk:

scorched, gutted, dehydrated –

head, limbs and trunk.

I slump on a deck-chair

and watch my wilted self steam

in the winter air.

At last stripped of self-esteem

I lie here god knows how long

under the cold twilight sky.

Only now I yearn to belong,

my social ineptitude to justify

and it’s to do with a mere gesture

like my refusal to stare,

or adopting a posture

of a foreign, ignorant bear.

Sadly, it is time to leave

at this most defenceless hour.

I hope that all of us believe

that after our exit shower,

taken in front of everyone

and no one in particular,

each of us will have done

our best to absolve the other.

We imparted our scruples

to the water. The water

changed us back to mortals,

by this much lighter.

 

February 13^th, 2011

Here are some photos of hot springs in Japan from the past. I always find historical photos vastly appealing. They evoke a sense of harmony, at times mystery and lost innocence, and most of all the unspoilt, uncluttered beauty of people, buildings, artefact. These particular images appear to be in public domain, and come from kinouya.com, a lovely site dedicated to old photos/postcards of Japan. There are dozens and dozens of them: to browse more photos click on the fifth button from the top, then click on the picture of a ship. The site is both in English and Japanese.

 Hakone Dogahisma Onsen

 

                                                                        Noboribetsu Onsen

                                                   Kinosaki Onsen, c. 1910

Click on photos to enlarge.

democracy in peril

Prince Charles and Camilla caught up in London violence after student fees vote

1/ Charles: Student fees are going up by 200%, I kid you not!
2/ Charles: My darling, your lower lip...I mean your upper lip...
3/ Charles: Look! They just pulled a man out of his wheelchair!
4/ Charles: Did I tell you dear, it costs the Met £50m a year to protect us.

In all the above 
Camilla: (speechless)

Well, if you can think of another 'speech bubble', do post a comment. Here are two more haunting images from the event:

democracy safeguarded...

 ...just about








more pics here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/12/london_tuition_fee_protest.html