yakihito

Ambient Archives Vol. 3: Chindogu

Continuing in this series of unreleased ambient music, here's "Chindogu," an album-length track recorded in 1996. This was intended to be the follow-up to Drift, an album I did with Dominic Cramp (Borful Tang) and released under the artist name, Arthur Dent and Deeper Than Space, on Silent Records.

The track was recorded live while rehearsing for some shows we did to support Drift. If I remember correctly, it was improvised in the same manner. Plug in a bunch of gear, turn it on, and see what happens. In this case, what happened was Silent Records was sold and the new owners weren't so interested in ambient music, as I recall.

Download Chindogu MP3

Enjoy!

Sushi Etiquette

I spotted this on my friend's blog the other day. I'm guilty of some of these, how about you?

Let's go through them one by one.

First the do's. Eat with your hands or chopsticks. I had heard of this before but have never eaten sushi with my fingers. The rice is kind of sticky so it just seemed messy.

Dip the fish, not the rice, into the soy sauce. I have never been told this but I have observed Japanese people do it. I try to do it but it's hard with chopsticks. Next time I'll try it with fingers.

Put the whole thing in your mouth, yes, but so that the fish touches your tongue? I have never seen anyone do this.

Use the back end of chopsticks when taking food from a shared plate. Sure, good advice for any chopstick situation.

Resting chopsticks on the holder, duh. Laying them across the soy sauce dish parallel to the bar to signal you're done? I've found that asking for the check (or in Japan, heading for the counter to pay) is a good way to indicate you're done.

Now the don'ts. Don't rub your chopsticks together. I have no idea if this is rude. I've been asked by non-Japanese if this is the case but I really have no idea. I try not to do it because those little chopstick slivers fall into your food. If you break the chopsticks apart carefully and cleanly they don't need to be rubbed together.

Don't bite the sushi in half and then put it back. Also, don't put it down anyone's shirt, or throw it at the wait staff. This is considered rude.

Don't put ginger on the fish. OK, I really have seen people do this and I just don't understand why you would want to. The flavor of the ginger is so strong.

Don't dunk the rice part in the soy sauce. See the do's above.

Don't put wasabi in the soy sauce. This I did know, but I still do it. I do it all the time actually.

Lastly, don't hand money to the sushi chef. Also, do not go behind the counter to embrace the chef. Do not follow him home, offer to clean his bathroom, or put air in his tires. This is considered rude.

You have to wonder who made this graphic, and who it's meant to protect. I used to go to a little Japanese place down the street from my house in LA, and I would see customers dumping soy sauce on their rice. I had heard this was a no-no, so one time I asked the guy at the counter if it bothered him. "No," he said with a tone that suggested, "Why the hell should it?"

Putting wasabi in your soy sauce may be considered bad form, but really, on the scale of offensive things to do in a public place with raw fish, it's pretty low on the list.

Itadakimasu!

The Sweet Smell of Hypocrisy

I've been listening to a lot of Perfume lately. You could even say my level of interest with the J-pop trio has turned to obsession. OK, so I'm not papering the walls of my room with glossies of the band's members, Nocchi, A-chan and Kashiyuki. Nor am I spending ludicrous amounts of money I don't have pre-ordering their new album, "Triangle" (the actual title is "⊿." No, seriously). But I have found myself listening to them pretty much exclusively in the car, much to the chagrin of the other 50 gigs of music on my iPod.

It didn't start out this way. I must have found them on the Internet, downloaded a few songs. I liked the electronic voices and the references to computer-this and computer-that. But I was already listening to a lot of electronic music, both Japanese and Western, and Perfume didn't immediately grab me.

Fast-forward to a few months ago. I'm home from a year in Japan and missing it terribly. Enter Perfume. Actually, enter Perfume into my car. Commuting more than an hour each way to school and back, Perfume would find its way into my play list. Or rather, it dominated it. Compressed to the point that the concept of "dynamics" is reduced to a joke with no punchline, Perfume's songs just jumped out. My bass-less speakers, straining to be heard over the wind noise and the whine from the old cassette deck, somehow could pump out Perfume like they were made by Bose. After a while, I couldn't hear anything else. Literally. Perfume is all I listen to now.

Maybe you've heard them, maybe not. If not, familiarize yourself with this before going any further:

See? It's really loud and up-front. And poppy. As a life-long hipster doofus I consider it a failure to succumb to pop music. Aside from an ill-advised interest in Jesus Jones in 1990 (in my defense, it was a really vulnerable time in my life) I've stayed true to the cause. But for some reason, no matter how manufactured and calculated, no matter how premeditated, I can allow myself the guilty pleasure of loving Japanese pop music. Well, some Japanese pop music. Much of it is brain-meltingly bland, like Morning Musume. But I do like Puffy. And Halcali. And now Perfume.

You'll notice that the bands I've mentioned are all female. Cute and female. Perhaps that's the deciding factor. I have zero time for boy bands. SMAP or Kinki Kids or whatever—into the incinerator you go. No, for me to stoop as low as the masses there has to be something in it for me. And Perfume's something is Nocchi.

You'd abandon your principles for her too, I'm sure. 

I've lost the point I was aiming for. Something about the hypocrisy of listening to Japanese pop music while hating American pop music. But whatever. I'm scouring the web for advance uploads of ⊿ and loving every Nocchi-filled minute of it. Now if only they would team up with Jesus Jones.

Watch Japanese TV Live

Ever feel like watching some Japanese TV? Well, now you can. (Hmm, sounds like a commercial.)

A friend told me about Freshverse, a website that live streams all the Japanese TV channels in both analog and high-quality digital. (You need to download a plug-in to stream the analog signal.)

Check it out:

http://www.freshverse.com

*UPDATE*

Looks like you need an invitation to join. Contact me in the comments if you want one.

Maid Man

I finally did something I’ve wanted to do in Japan for years. Not, not go on a date with Aoi Miyazaki. No, not tromp around the Toho back lot in a Godzilla suit. I went to a maid café.

For those of you not in the know, a maid café is where you go to be served by cute girls in frilly, mini-skirt maid outfits. They greet you with “Welcome home, master” and serve you coffee with a heart drawn in the foam. They’re incredibly popular with “otaku,” the folks who dedicate their lives to manga and anime, and I’ve heard there’s even one in Canada.

I dragged two brave friends with me to Royal Milk, located in otaku-land itself, Akihabara. We found it tucked down an alley, located at the top of a very nondescript staircase. We stepped inside to find the cutest, pinkest, most dolly place ever. It was as if an 8-year-old girl was given cart blanche to design her dream café. I was about to label it the least sexiest place I had ever been (even below that nasty Burger King next to San Francisco Civic Center) when not one, but two girls in lacey maid skirts and thigh-high stockings greeted us.

Now, I should explain that these are not sex places. They’re barely even “adult” in the main use of the word. But they are for men, essentially, so the girls—as chipper-cutesy and harmless as they are—are still attractive, and wearing the kinds of outfits that wives will only reluctantly wear for their husbands after being told by a marriage counselor that they need to “spice up their love lives.”

We were shown to our table, and after some confusion about whether we could speak Japanese or not, beer was ordered. After getting over the disappointment that there was no heart in the foam of the beer head, we took a look around. There were about 10 other guys there (there were no women), all about our age (old enough to have seen the original Star Wars movies in the theater the first time), and all studiously ignoring the waitresses. Apparently whatever was happening on their PSPs or cell phones was more interesting than frilly mini-skirts. Flabbergasting this, truly flabbergasting.

We ordered another round and then soon found ourselves with a maid on either side of the table. The one to my left started:

“Should I ask it? Should I?”

“Go ahead,” the other encouraged with a giggle.

I was ready for it. I could see it coming from kilometers away, lit up by search lights and blinking, buzzing neon: “Where are you from?”

And so began a rather entertaining conversation about America, with all the usual themes being touched on: food, movies, Obama (“Yes we can!”). After a few minutes of this, what with the two beers and close proximity of frilly skirts, I was absolutely giddy.

The girls moved on to giggle at other tables and, with our beers done, we left to wander the streets of Akihabara in a post-maid haze. And while pissing in a McDonald’s bathroom 30 minutes later, it hit me: those girls were not really interested in us. Nor America. Nor even, perhaps, Obama. By speaking to us, they were merely doing their jobs. This floored me.

I always considered myself above the pull of the mizu shobai (literally, “water business”), the Japanese term for hostess clubs and other such places, where women pour drinks for men and tell them how manly they are for working for Hitachi. I may be a man, but I’m no dummy. Of course, I had never been to a hostess club, but really, how interesting could it be? Paying money to be flattered by women? Please. I have more self-respect than that.

But standing there, pissing out two over-priced maid café beers, I realized that I was just like any other customer of the water trade. For the price of a few drinks, I was made happy by attractive women. I was made to feel important, that what I said was interesting and—more importantly—more interesting than what anyone else in the place had to say.

And you know what? I loved it.

Odawara Castle

Is it incongruous for a pacifist to love castles? Me, who loathes war, bristles at conflict, just adores military fortresses. Japan has something like 40 castles. My dream is to see them all. I've seen quite a few but nowhere near enough. Last week I added another to my list: Odawara Castle.

Odawara Castle is a reconstruction (all save 12 are) but that doesn't make all that much difference really. It's 30 minutes by bullet train south of Tokyo, the closest castle (that I know of) to the capital.

Unlike many castles in Japan, which were built during periods of peace as symbols of strength, Odawara Castle was most definitely a military stronghold. It was besieged twice, by both Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen (he who eventually was defeated spectacularly by Oda Nobunaga). Toyotomo Hideyoshi finally took the castle in 1590, and then passed it on to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who would eventually establish a shogunate over Japan. So yeah, important place.

Like many other castles in Japan, it was demolished during the Meiji Restoration, but then rebuilt during the 1960s.

So let's see, how many castles have I been to now? I've decided that I can't count mere ruins, like the stones of Edo Castle at the Imperial Palace, nor can I count a castle with no donjon (main building), so that leaves out Oita too.

1. Odawara
2. Matsue (original)
3. Kumamoto
4. Kitsuki
5. Nakatsu
6. Hiroshima
7. Himeji
8. Osaka
9. Nagoya
10. Inuyama (original)
11. Kokura
12. Okayama

Twelve. Not too shabby.

Size Matters

If you're big...

If you're bigger...

But if you're, well, not so much, at least you're...

Kamakura Daibutsu

The big Buddha at Kamakura, down the coast from Tokyo, is spectacular. Even a throng of school kids, milling around and yelling, couldn't detract from its majesty.

The bronze statue of the Amida Buddha was erected in the 13th century, when Kamakura was the military capital of Japan. The statue was originally housed in a wooden building but this was destroyed during a tsunami.

I could have stared at it all day, if it wasn't for those darned kids.

Kawaii Samurai

Taken at the National Museum in Ueno. It's hard to tell from this picture, but this suit of armor is pelted in bear fur, complete with cute li'l bear ears. Kawaii!

Get the Balance Right

Spotted in Ueno Park the other day. Guy said he had been practicing since high school. The crowd loved him.