A minute ago I was trying to download a movie and this ad popped up talking about “the Japanese girl who eats everything”. It was a YouTube so it had to be SFW, so I clicked out of curiosity, and this girl took the screen claiming to eat a 10-person meal in one go, that is, 7000 plus kcal -or 3 kg- dishes, and the video had more than a million views. Here in Japan a lot of lines have been crossed in the last two decades, and “everything is allowed” nowadays, no matter how bizarre, weird or far-fetched it sounds. There is a whole bunch of human chimeras gaining ground in the streets, in the malls, in the parks, in the TV and on the Internet; human chimeras that reflect this portion of society clinging to unthinkable colors and textures, clothing that mixes Middle Age motifs with psychedelia, make-up as a public claim of a breakup with the status quo, pop music and underground culture of a futurist drift. All in all bright, loud, notorious lifestyles, immune to the opinion of the others, and partying inside trains. We are talking about a country where millions of salarymen, middle-rank employees, work 80+ hours a week stuffed in the binariety of the tieless suit and a white shirt, be it either to provide the family with moneis or to even avoid the family altogether. Some old school housewives complain that when men retire, they become a nuisance at home. With this I want to highlight that, even though there’s a whole lot of people in between, including masses of women who enjoy the traditional permanent dole life filling the shopping streets during the day, there is an spectacular contrast between the “modern”, wild people who refuse to let go of the dreams and pleasures that give meaning to the 6AM alarm and the people who gave up both of these, who have become dream-less, goal-less, colorless humans.
If you have a good Internet connection, I suggest you watch a clip of the movie Funky Forest, which is kind of an updated, pop and urbanized version of Kurosawa’s Dreams, with all the elements that sum up what Japan is to other countries.
I want to stress on the fact that housewives are old school because feminism in Japan is struggling, but it is nonetheless growing like wildfire in political, cultural and business environments. Women are getting away from the patriarchy that manga and anime still massively sell. The president’s wife, previously an advertising graduate who made a living as a DJ, is one of feminism in Japan’s most visible faces, strongly supporting both feminism and sexual minorities and the LGBT community. Nowadays, gay marriage is still illegal everywhere in the country with the exception of Shibuya, a district in Tokyo; a very heterogeneous, westernized and strident district. Elsewhere, homosexuals get around the prohibition of marriage using koseki as a substitute. Koseki is kind of a legal certificate that states what members of society belong to a certain household (both in terms of family and of the physical place, but I may be wrong here). By registering in each other’s koseki, gay couples are effectively a couple that can enjoy the same privileges and advantages of a woman-man marriage.
Going back from Tokyo to Sagamihara for a bit, it is after all a dormitory city where nothing happens, till something happens. An explosion made worldwide headlines some weeks ago, where a warehouse full of oxide fuel cells of the U.S. army depot base in Fuchinobe blew up for reasons unknown (it was not an attack, mind you). American news hurriedly mentioned along that the army people from this base helped a lot during the 2011 tsunami crisis, in case any Americans woke up and realised they have Japan occupied (because “freedom is not free”, right?). We also had a 7.8 earthquake (like the one in Nepal, but hundreds of km underground). It was my second quake since I got here, so by then I was totally used to them quakes already, though I had to stop cooking. I was in the middle of making some four or fives paellas for my colleagues at the agency. Apparently, phone companies do send a warning message prior to quakes, but guess who did not receive a warning message in his phone… thank you, Docomo. There is a small community of scientists/weirdos who say and want everyone to believe that all the quakes in the last decade -including the one that caused Tohoku’s 2011 tsunami- are but a premonition of “The Big One” that should hit Tokyo around 2017 (and swipe the whole country out!!, I said this). Oh, there is an earthquake simulator somewhere, where six-story structures are tested. They are actually very prepared for any quakes (I know everyone knows that), so it’s okay. I haven’t been caught in the toilet by an earthquake yet, so I consider myself a very lucky human. Explosions and quakes aside, Sagamihara is still very uneventful. There was this South-American circus on tour, whose members came to JAXA to play some soccer games. But nothing else has happened that I can think of. I used to go to the only karaoke in the hood with a friend, but this friend sings the same songs every time we go to karaoke, so I stopped going to the karaoke.
The hotel I have been living in for 6 months, and the campus as well, are basically surrounded by little patches of forest, which is really chill; the isolation, the silence (EXCEPT FOR THE DAMN CRICKETS, SERIOUSLY, THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT HAPPENED TO JAPAN) and the smell of forest, of nature. It smells really nice after every rainfall. Kind of brings back memories of Goa, green forest-roads Indian Goa. The featured image of this blog entry was taken from the rooftop of the main research building where my lab’s at. Whenever I find myself alone in the lab for hours, I make sure to grab a beer or whatever Japanese snack I am addicted to at the moment, and I make for the rooftop alone and just chill and enjoy the warm sunsets and think of all the stories that I want to share with others, all the characters I want to write about, and then I think how books don’t really give you enough money unless you have published a couple of best-sellers already or they adapt your novel into film and you managed to secure a nice residual, so then I think that a travel blog pays better, so I write bits for this blog, which is not a travel blog because I am not really travelling.
Throughout my stay in this lab, I have been part of a daily cultural exchange, which includes music suggestions like UverWorld, 踊ってばかりの国, X Japan, and the #1 record selling Japanese band of all time, B’z. However, no matter how good the song is, there’s always been something about Japanese music that made it sound immature or unprofessional to me. Beyond whatever the lyrics talk about, there is something that doesn’t sound quite good enough when I compare it to Western music, and that is the voice. I just thought it was a matter of Japanese being a syllabic language, but never really cared. My labmate was a bit confused, so I had to objectify this, and thus care to have a less abstract explanation. At conversation speed, all’s fine, but when you move on to song speed, it sounds like the person is tripping his sentences, exaggerating the uniqueness of every syllable, which makes it all sound way less fluid than English, Spanish or Catalan. Thing is, all of these Indo-European languages (including all Norse-related, Germanic, Latin, Indian languages and more) are fusional. This means that the morphemes kind of overlap or merge around when forming full sentences. But Japanese is not fusional; it is an agglutinative language, in which morphemes are chained instead, not overlapping or fusioning while fading away the “edges” of every word. I believe (and this may be all wrong and have nothing to do with each other, but anyway) that this directly translates into an extremely regular pronunciation, id est, a morphophonology with little variations throughout the sentences. Additionally, almost all the syllables (or kana) are either a vowell alone or a system of consonant+vowel (a, e, i, ka, ke, ki, sa, se, shi…), which means they struggle to pronounce consonants alone (except n, m and s, words never end in any other consonant, they end with a vowel). Why, yes they do have slangs and they do stretch many vowels (arigatoo, tookyoo, sayoonara…), but the game is pretty limited. I invite you to check these videos embedded in the post, and judge yourself. I know it’s an unfair choice of songs, but you get the point. This might have been obvious for a lot of people, but I needed to dig into it to let it go off my mind. This whole thing led me to believe Japanese singers are less skilled, specially pop artists, which is most definitely false. There is a number of Japanese bands who sing in English, but that is a risky move because they lose a lot of Japanese fans who can’t feel the songs to be close to them, and they certainly do not gain many English fans because of their poor English skills (some get away with it, of course, like One OK Rock). It is also very common to constantly switch forth and back from Japanese to English through a song.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__gLp_GImtA]
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsUlOY1wU6c]
This fact also explains why Japanese have such enormous problems of pronunciation when it comes to English; they instinctively try to separate morphemes that are not separate. Finally, this also explains why I thought the Turkish labmate was very good at Japanese and had hour-long Japanese conversations in the phone, but still couldn’t really understand a word. Turns out Turkish (and Korean and some others) is also an agglutinative language, so that stopping at each syllable happens as well. My silly brain kind of pictures these as syllable-step-function languages, while fusional would be some sort of a Gaussian distribution instead. (Sorry for that)
Here’s a picture of the bounty I took home from the last party I attended. I hate and embrace the fact that Japanese systematically throw food away. They do take very good care of this thrown-away food and keep it away from the public, so dumpster-diving is not an option in many places.
